Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/96

 makes harmonies majestic as any note of the heights or depths of natural sound. No highest verse can excel the mighty flow and chiming force of its continuous modulation, bearing on foamless waves of profound song its flock of winged thoughts and embodied visions. We hear in it as it were for once the sound of time's soundless feet, feel for once the beat of his unfelt wings in their passage through unknown places, and centuries without form and void. Echoes and gleams come with it from "the dark backward and abysm" of dateless days; a sighing sound from the graves of gods, a wind through the doors of death which opened on the early world. The surviving shadow of the Bull-God is as the shadow of death on past and passing ages, visible and recognisable by the afterlight of thought. Of the harmonious might and majesty of imagination which sustains the "speculative and active instrument" of song, we might take as separate samples the verses on its old days of worship from kings and queens, of light from lamps of prayer or fires of ruin; on the elder and later gods confused with its confusion, "all relics here together;" on the cities that rose and fell before the city of its worshippers; of their desolation and its own in the days of Christ. The stanza on the vision of the temptation has a glory on it as of Milton's work.

The day when he, Pride's lord and man's, Shewed all earth's kingdoms at a glance To Him before whose countenance The years recede, the years advance, And said, "Fall down and worship me:'— 'Mid all the pomp beneath his look Then stirred there, haply, some rebuke