Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/322

 imagination only strong to deal with tragic sentiment and situation; strong to dive and keen to peer into depths of emotion and recesses of endurance "dove il sol tace," not swift or light of wing, not vast or etherial of flight, not lustrous or various of plumage; but piercing and intense of sight, steady and sure of stroke, solemn and profound of strain. He gains strength with the strength of his subject; he wants deep water to swim well. The moral nature with which he is fittest to deal must be large enough to dare or to bear things beyond all common measure; resolute for any deed or any doom. Within the usual scope of action or the ordinary limit of suffering the energy of his spirit has hardly free play. In the hard cast and sombre loneliness of this energy he resembles Byron on one side—the outer side rather than the inner faculty; though there is in both the same fixity and insistence of purpose, the same solitary and brooding weight of will, the same lurid force and singleness of mind. In light, imagination, musical instinct, and all qualities of poetry pure and simple, both are alike below the higher order of poets; in the verse of neither is there that instant and sensible melody which comes only of a secret and sovereign harmony of the whole nature, and which comes of it inevitably and unmistakeably.

We often see the names of Webster and Ford bracketed as equal and parallel examples of the same kind or school of poets; to me these two great men seem to belong to wholly different orders; I should no more venture to set Ford by the side of Webster than Byron by the side of Shelley. If not altogether as great in degree, the difference is assuredly the same in kind. On this as on