at a new and austere faith has
triumphed, but predicts that its kingdom will not last, will decline
and fall like the empire of the elder gods--

'All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and
be past;
Ye are gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you
at last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes
of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you
for kings.'

The 'Hymn to Proserpine' is a fine conception of the champion of a
lost cause standing unmoved among the ruins of his Pantheon. But the
quiet dignity of his attitude is marred by the lines in which the
votary of fair forms turns with loathing from the new faith which has
conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent
invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and
highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that
Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the
evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have
replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or
fifteen centuries later in his native country, would have found these
evils enormously increased, and that the sacrifice of Iphigenia in
Aulis was as nothing to the hecatombs of the Inquisition.

His intense imagination summons up a bright and luxurious vision of
the pre-Christian civilisation in Greece and Rome, as yet little
affected by the deeper spiritualism of Asia; he is absorbed in
contemplation of the beautiful sensuous aspect of the old
nature-worship, as it is represented by poetry and the plastic arts,
by singers and sculptors who (one may remark) knew better than to deal
with its darker and degrading side, its orgies and unabashed
animalism. And we may add that Mr. Swinburne would have done well to
follow the example, in this respect, of these great masters of his own
art; since his early defects and excesses are mainly due to his having
missed their lesson by disregarding the limitations which they
scrupulously observed.

When he reissued the _Poems and Ballads_, Mr. Swinburne took occasion,
as we have said, to reply, in a pamphlet, to the strictures and strong
protests which they had aroused. He was at some trouble to discover
the passages or phrases 'that had drawn down such sudden thunder from
the serene heavens of public virtue': he was comically puz