waded
The lords of fight;
When churl and craven
Saw hard on haven
The wide-winged raven
At mainmast height;
When monks affrighted
To windward sighted
The birds full-flighted
Of swift sea-kings;
So earth turns paler
When Storm the sailor
Steers in with a roar in the race of his wings.'

But more frequently the outlook on sea and land induces reverie, vague
yearnings, retrospective sadness, and, like all true artists, he
transposes into the landscape his own personal emotions, what he sees,
feels, and remembers. In the poem of 'Hesperia' the view of the sunset
over the sea stirs tender memories; the 'deep-tide wind blowing in
with the water' seems to be wafting his absent love back to him, and
his heart floats out toward her 'as the refluent seaweed moves in the
languid exuberant stream.' In such pieces the fierce amorous obsession
has been shaken off; he is no longer vexed by Shakespeare's[32]
hyperbolic fiend, his mood is comparatively gentle and pathetic, as in
the beautiful verses of 'A Forsaken Garden,' where his consummate
faculty of metrical expression, wherein sense and sound are matched
and inseparable, reaches, perhaps, its highest watermark:

'Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.'

In the series of landscape sketches grouped under the title of _A
Midsummer Holiday_, published nearly twenty years after the _Poems and
Ballads_, the treatment of his subject has become more impersonal. The
impression or idea is still coloured by transmission through the
spectator's mind. Mr. Swinburne has himself observed, very truly, that

'mere descriptive poetry of the prepense and formal kind is
exceptionally liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dulness:
it is unnecessary to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the
presence or emotion of a spectator, but it is necessary to make it
felt and keep it perceptible if the poem is to have life in it or
even a right to live.'[33]

This is the right doctrine, and we may add that it is applicable as a
criticism to some of his earlier descriptive pieces, where the intense
personal feeling is somewhat too intense and disproportionate; so that
a read