Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/41

 and very well chosen, to show the mature genius of Byron at its mightiest, he has been careful to alter and improve by the studious and judicious excision of two whole intervening stanzas; the second good in itself, but introduced by one stolen from Coleridge and deformed almost past recognition from a thing of supreme and perfect beauty into a formless and tuneless mass of clumsy verbosity and floundering incoherence. Even thus garbled and disembowelled, the passage, noble and delightful as in the main it is, stands yet defaced by two lines which no poet of the first order could have committed; two lines showing such hideous deficiency of instinct, such helpless want of the imaginative sense which in the highest poets is as strong and as sure to preserve from error as to impel towards perfection, that any man with an inner ear for that twin-born music of coequal thought and word without which there is no high poetry possible, must feel with all regret that here is not one of the poets who can be trusted by those who would enjoy them; but one who at the highest and smoothest of his full-winged flight is liable to some horrible collapse or flap of a dislocated pinion. The first offence is that monstrous simile—monstrous at once and mean—of "the light of a dark eye in woman," which must surely have been stolen from Hayley; if even the author of the "Triumphs of Temper" can ever have thought a woman's eye an apt and noble likeness for the whole heaven