Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/66

 thing most near and real; and if the heroic bones be still fleshless and the heroic poems lifeless, the fault is not in the bones but in the poems, not in the theme but in the singer. As vain it is, not indeed to invite the muse to new spheres and fresher fields whither also she will surely and gladly come, but to bid her "migrate from Greece and Ionia, cross out those immensely overpaid accounts, that matter of Troy, and Achilles' wrath, and Æneas', Odysseus' wanderings;" forsake her temples and castles of old for the new quarters which doubtless also suit her well and make her welcome; for neither epic nor romance of chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever can be; there is nothing in the past extinct; no scroll is "closed for ever," no legend or vision of Hellenic or feudal faith "dissolved utterly like an exhalation:" all that ever had life in it has life in it for ever; those themes only are dead which never were other than dead. 'She has left them all, and is here;" so the prophet of the new world vaunts himself in vain; she is there indeed, as he says, "by thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismayed«-smiling and pleased, with palpable intent to stay;" but she has not needed for that to leave her old abodes; she is not a dependent creature of time or place, "servile to all the skiey influences;" she need not climb mountains of cross seas to bestow on all nations at once the light of her countenance; she is omnipresent and eternal, and forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor Crusader, to dwell as she does with equal good-will among modern appliances in London and New York. All times and all places are one to her; the stuff she deals with is eternal, and eter-