are tainted by a
flavour of morbidity, and the average Englishman is not easily thrown
by the most potent spells into a state of amorous delirium.

It is not surprising, therefore, that this first volume of poems,
saturated with intoxicating Hedonism, had, as Mr. Swinburne wrote in
the Dedicatory Preface appended to the full collection of his works,
'as quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard
or read of.' The eruption of neo-paganism was sudden and unexpectedly
violent--the rumblings of scientific and philosophic scepticism had
given no warning of a volcanic explosion in this direction. The
current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken
than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of
Byron's time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the
middle class was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no
means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who
presided over man's unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than
somewhat aghast at the invocations of Astarte or Ashtaroth, or the cry
to Our Lady of Pain, the 'noble and nude and antique.' The result was
that the first edition of the _Poems and Ballads_ was withdrawn,
though they were reissued in the same year, when Mr. Swinburne
published a reply to his critics. Nevertheless, although the graver
and, we may say, the higher judges of what was admissible to a
nineteenth-century poet were entirely against him, it cannot be denied
that the impulsive youth of that generation felt the enchantment of
Mr. Swinburne's intoxicating love-potions--were sorely tempted to dash
down Tennyson on the drawing-room table, and to join the wild dance
round the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemia.

In the _Poems and Ballads_ Mr. Swinburne keeps on some terms, so to
speak, with theology. In the poem entitled 'A Litany' the Lord God
discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before
Him, and threatens them with 'the inevitable Hell,' while the people
implore mercy--a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the
flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of
the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian martyr. It is true that he
looks back with aesthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over
the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps the finest poem in this
volume is the 'Hymn to Proserpine,' where a votary of the ancient
divinities confesses sorrowfully th