religious or political
tyranny.

After Tennyson's death, in 1892, Swinburne was the greatest living
English poet; but, even if his verse had not offended Queen Victoria
for the foregoing reasons, she would not have appointed him
poet-laureate after the misery of the Russians had moved him in 1890
to write, referring to the Czar:--

"Night hath naught but one red star--Tyrannicide.

"God or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay:
Smite and send him howling down his father's way."

Swinburne's crowning glory is his unquestioned mastery, unsurpassed by
any poet since Milton, of the technique of varied melodious verse.
This quality is evident, no matter whether he is describing the
laughter of a child:--

"Sweeter far than all things heard,
Hand of harper, tone of bird,
Sound of woods at sundawn stirr'd,
Welling water's winsome ward,
Wind in warm wan weather,"

or expressing his fierce hatred for any condition or place where--

"...a curse was or a chain
A throne for torment or a crown for bane
Rose, moulded out of poor men's molten pain,"

or singing the song of a lover--

"If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pleasure or grey grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf;"

or voicing his early creed--

"That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea,"

or chanting in far nobler strains the Anglo-Saxon belief in the
molding power of an infinite presence--

"I am in thee to save thee,
As my soul in thee saith,
Give thou as I gave thee,
Thy life-blood and breath,
Green leaves of thy labor, white flowers of thy thought, and red
fruit of thy death."

RUDYARD KIPLING, 1865-

[Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING. _From the painting by John
Collier_.]

Life.--Rudyard Kipling, the youngest of the great Victorians, was
born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His parents were people of culture and
artistic training, the father, John Lockwood Kipling, being a
recognized authority on Indian art. Like most English children born in
India, Kipling, when very small, was sent to England to escape the
fatal Indian heat. Afterwards in the story _Baa, Baa, Black Sheep_,
Kip