o have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all,"

will no longer interest readers. To Tennyson belong--

"Jewels five words long
That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time
Sparkle forever."

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909

[Illustration: ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1837-1909. _From the
painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti_.]

Life.--Swinburne was born in London in 1837. His father was an
admiral in the English navy, and his mother, the daughter of an earl.
The boy passed his summers in Northumberland and his winters in the
Isle of Wight. He thus acquired that fondness for the sea, so
noticeable in his poetry. His early experiences are traceable in lines
like these:--

"Our bosom-belted billowy-blossoming hills,
Whose hearts break out in laughter like the sea."

He went to Oxford for three years, but left without taking his degree.
The story is current that he knew more Greek than his teachers but
that he failed in an examination on the _Scriptures_. He sought to
complete his education by wide reading and by travel, especially in
France and Italy.

When he was twenty-five, he went to live for a short time at 16 Cheyne
Walk, Chelsea, in the western part of London, in the same house with
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith. Swinburne admired
Rossetti's poetry and was much impressed with the Pre-Raphaelite
virtues of simplicity and directness.

Swinburne never married. His deafness caused him to pass much of his
long life in comparative retirement. His last thirty years were spent
with his friend, the critic and poet, Theodore Watts-Dunton, at Putney
on the Thames, a few miles southwest of London. Swinburne died in 1909
and was buried at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight.

Works.--In 1864 England was enchanted with the melody of the
choruses in his _Atalanta in Calydon_, a dramatic poem in the old
Greek form. Lines like the following from the chorus, _The Youth of
the Year_, show the quality for which his verse is most famous:--

"When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain."

The first series of his _Poems and Ballads_ (1866) contains _The
Garden of Proserpine_, one of his best known poems. Proserpine
"forgets the earth her mother" and goes to her "bloomless" garden:--

"And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow