Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/97

 Where to the wind the salt pools shook, And in those tracts, of life forsook, That knew thee not, O Nineveh!"

And what more august and strenuous passion of thought was ever clothed in purple of more imperial speech than consummates and concludes the poem? as, dreaming of a chance by which in the far future this God, found again a relic in a long ruined city, might be taken for the God of its inhabitants, the thinker comes to find in it indeed "the God of this world" and no dead idol, but a living deity and very present strength; having wings, but not to fly with; and eyes, but not to look up with; bearing a written witness and a message engraved of which he knows not, and cannot read it; crowned, but not for honour; brow-bound with a royal sign, of oppression only and contraction; firm of foot, but resting the weight of its trust on clay:—

O Nineveh, was this thy God, Thine also, mighty Nineveh?"

A certain section of Mr. Rossetti's work as poet and as painter may be classed under the head of sacred art: and this section comprises much of his most exquisite and especial work. Its religious quality is singular and personal in kind; we cannot properly bracket it with any other workman's. The fire of feeling and imagination which feeds it is essentially Christian, and is therefore formally and spiritually Catholic. It has nothing of rebellious Protestant personality, nothing of the popular compromise of sentiment which in the hybrid jargon of a school of hybrids we may call liberalized Christianism. The influence which plainly has passed over the writer's