and tabernacles, priests and kings, the Roman Pope and the Jewish
Jehovah; one for whom the Papacy is, as it was to Hobbes, the Kingdom
of Darkness, its record blotted with tears and stained with blood, the
'grey spouse of Satan,' as he styled her in a later poem, sitting by a
fire that is fed with the bones of her victims. From this time
forward he declares open war upon theology, and even upon Theism; he
is the mortal foe of bigots and tyrants; his praise is for Giordano
Bruno, for Pelagius the British monk, born by the northern sea; for
Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause of
intellectual emancipation. The prevailing religious beliefs seem to
him relics of mediaeval superstition, sophistry, and metaphysic--he
contrasts them with the bright and free nature worship of the old
world; he is a bitter enemy of the lofty spiritualism, the mighty
world-religion, before which the fair humanities of the _juventus
mundi_ had faded away. His delight is in the virile qualities of the
earlier civilisations, the patriotism, the heroic temper, the ardour
for civic liberties, the Hellenic delight in noble form and in
physical beauty. He is fretted by the restraint which Christian
authority imposes upon the unruly affections of sinful men; he scorns
the terrors of judgment to come, the prostration of the multitude
before the threat of eternal punishment, and the promise of celestial
recompense for terrestrial misery. Death is the 'sleep eternal in an
eternal night'; and the one thing as certain as death is pleasure. He
is the prophet of Hedonism; he is for giving the passions a loose
rein, for drinking the wine of rapture to the lees before we lie

'Deep in dim death, beneath the grass
Where no thought stings.'

Nevertheless, as the years go on, the note of regret and despair
quiets down, the restless spirit of the poet is subdued to the calmer
influences of nature; the charm of scenery, the association of places
with memories more frequently bring softer inspirations. In his
earlier poems his imaginative power found full scope in rendering the
impressions of natural beauty, the glory of elemental strife; as in
the 'Songs of the Four Seasons,' where the approach of a storm from
the sea is likened to a descent of the Norse pirates on to the
peaceful coast, and the metaphor produces a spirited picture:

'As men's cheeks faded
On shores invaded
When shorewards