Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/72

 was a Thanksgiving Ode of wooden verse sawn into unequal planks and tagged incongr0uously with tuneless bells of rhyme torn from the author's late professional cap. It was modelled on the chaotic songs of ceremony done to order on state occasions by our laureates of the Restoration and Revolution; preferable in this alone, that the modern author had the grace not to call it Pindaric: which in the sense of Whitehall, not of Thebes, it was; being cut into verses uneven, misshapen, irregular, and irresponsive. As a speech it might have passed muster on the platform; as a song it gave out no sound but such as of the platform's wood. Nor indeed could it; for while it had something of thought and more of eloquence, there was within it no breath or pulse of the thing called poetry. This gracious chant among others has been much belauded—incomparably beyond any praise given in any such quarter to Whitman's deathless hymn of death—by a writer on poetry whom Mr. Austin has reviled with as much acrimony as if he were instead a poet; calling his poor fellow-critic "an ignorant and presumptuous scribbler, wholly unentitled to give an opinion on poetry at all." Far be it from me this time to dispute the perfect justice of the verdict; but I had some hope till now that there might be truth in the proverb, "Hawks do not pyke out hawks' een." It is painful for the naturalist to be compelled to register in his