Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/175

 age. Above all, he knows what as a poet he should do, and simply does that; the manner of his good work is never more or less than right; his verse comes clean and full out of the mould, cast at a single jet; placed beside much other verse of the time, it shows like a sculptor's work by an enameller's. With all their wealth and warmth of flowers and lights, these two twin poems are solid and pure as granite or as gold. Their sweet sufficiency of music, so full and calm, buoys and bears up throughout the imperial vessel of thought. Their sadness is not chill or sterile, but as the sorrow of summer pausing with laden hands on the middle height of the year, the watershed that divides the feeding fountains of autumn and of spring; a grave and fruitful sadness, the triumphant melancholy of full-blown flowers and souls full-grown. The stanzas from the sixth to the fourteenth of "Thyrsis," and again from the sixteenth to the twentieth, are if possible the most lovely in either poem; the deepest in tone and amplest in colour; the choiceness and sweetness of single lines and phrases most exquisite and frequent.

She has learnt to know them now, the river and the river-meadows, and access is as easy for an English as a Dorian