Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/178

 for those who remember reading the first at the time when all the loves we read of assume a form and ascend a throne in our thoughts, the old and the new-side by side, so that now this poem comes under our eyes like a new love-song of Petrarca to Laura or Coleridge to Geneviève. It is fine and high in tone, but not such as the famous verses, cited and admired even by critics sparing of their priceless praise, beginning

These in their profound and passionate calm strike deeper and sound fuller than any other of the plaintive dejected songs of Switzerland. "Dover Beach" marks another high point in the volume; it has a grand choral cadence as of steady surges, regular in resonance, not fitful or gusty but antiphonal and reverberate. But nothing of new verse here clings closer to the mind than the overture of that majestic fragment from the chorus of a "Dejaneira"

We must hope to have more of the tragedy in time; that must be a noble statue which could match this massive fragment. The story of Merope, though dramatic enough in detail, is upon the whole more of a narrative romance than a tragic subject; in Mr. Arnold's poem the deepest note is that struck by the tyrant Polyphontes, whose austere and patient figure is carved with Sophoclean skill of hand. It is a poem which Milton might have praised, an august work, of steady aim and severe success; but this of Dejaneira has in it a loftier promise and a