Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/93

 Amorous languishments, luminous trances, Sights which are not seen with eyes, Spiritual and soul-piercing glances; Whose pure and subtle lightning flies Home to the heart, and sets the house on fire; And melts it down in sweet desire: Yet doth not stay To ask the windows leave to pass that way.

Delicious deaths, soft exhalations Of soul! dear and divine annihilations! A thousand unknown rites Of joys and rarified delights!" On a Prayer Book sent to Mrs. M. R.

This might have been pardonable in a Roman Catholic of Selden's time, but the echo of it in a "mature" person of the nineteenth century is positively dreadful.

I close this book of the "mature" person. I close Mr. Swinburne's volumes. I try to gather some definite impression, some thought, some light, from what I have been reading. I find my mind jaded, my whole body sick and distressed, a dull pain lurking in the region of the medulla oblongata. I try to picture up Mr. Rossetti's poetry, and I am dazzled by conceits in sixteenth-century costume,—"rosy