Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/161

 of the lyre; and he has had to refashion it for himself among a nation and in an age of flute-players and horn-blowers.

For the rest, the scheme of this poem is somewhat meagre and inefficient. Dramatic or not, the figure of Empedocles as here conceived is noble, full of a high and serene interest; but the figure as here represented is a ghost, without form and void; and darkness is upon the face of the deep in which his life lies stagnant; and we look in vain for the spirit to move upon the face of the waters. Dimly and with something of discomfort and depression we perceive the shadow of the poet's design; we discern in rough and thin outline the likeness of the wise world-wearied man, worn down and worsted in the struggle of spirit against unwisdom and change and adverse force of men and things. But how he stands thus apart among the saints and sophists, whence and whither he comes and goes, what ruin lies behind or what revolution before, we hardly see at all Not only do we contemplate a disembodied spirit, but a spirit of which we cannot determine how it was once embodied, what forms of thought or sense it once put on, what labour and what life it once went through. There is a poetry of the bodiless intellect, which without touching with finger-tip or wing-tip the edge of actual things may be wise and sweet and fruitful and sublime; but at least we must see the light and feel the air which guides forward and buoys upward the naked fleshless feet of the spirit. Grant that we want no details of bodily life and terrene circumstance, no touch of local or temporal colour; we want at least an indication of the spiritual circumstance, the