Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/44

 weakness. In the next month's verses addressed to the child in a time of sickness the pathos is more direct and tangible; more tender and exquisite than this it could not be. Again, in January, we have a glimpse "between two bombardments" of the growing and changing charm of the newly weaned angel, now ambitious to feel its feet on earth instead of the wings it left in heaven; on terms of household intimacy with an actual kitten, and old enough to laugh at angels yet unweaned.

With the one eternal exception of Shakespeare, what other poet has ever strewn the intervals of tragedy with blossoms of such breath and colour? The very verse seems a thing of flowerlike and childlike growth, the very body of the song a piece of living nature like any bud that bursts or young life that comes forth in spring. We are reminded of the interlude in Macbeth made by the prattle of Macduff's child between the scenes of incantation and of murder. Beside these the student will set in the high places of remembrance the lines on a shell falling where once were the Feuillantines—that garden of now immortal blossom, of unwithering flower and fruit undecaying, where the grey-haired Master was once a fair haired child, and watched beyond the flight of doves at sunrise the opening in heaven of the chaliced flower of dawn-in the same heaven where now blazes over his head the horrible efflorescence of the bursting shell. "Here his soul flew forth singing; here before his