er gifted with less keenness of sensibility is disconcerted by
insistence on effusive moods with which he cannot be expected to be in
full sympathy. Mr. Swinburne might reply that for such dullards he
does not write; but the finest wines are too heady for a morning's
draught. In his more mature poems he appears to have deliberately held
back what may be termed the subjective emotion; the landscapes are no
longer peopled by figures or memories of the past; the thoughts which
they suggest are such as find response in all minds that are in accord
with the deeper and more subtle relations of human life to its
environment. He himself has indeed told us[34] that to many of his
studies of English land and sea no intimacy of years and no
association with the past has given any colour of emotion, that only
so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring
these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive
that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the
spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or
woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the
sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The _Midsummer Holiday_ group
has two pictures of sweet homeliness--'The Mill Garden' and 'On a
Country Road'--the harvest of a quiet eye (in Wordsworth's phrase),
such as a rambling artist might jot down in his travelling sketch
book, of value the more remarkable because they are not in Mr.
Swinburne's usual manner. They give relief to the breadth and grandeur
of the other descriptions of the ocean, the crags, and the storms. For
to Swinburne, as to all the romantic English poets, the ocean stream
which encircles their island is an inexhaustible source of delight and
pride; it is our ever present defence in time of trouble; the fountain
of our country's wealth and honour; it is our traditional battlefield;
the winds and the waves are the breath and the force of our national
being. And through Mr. Swinburne's poetry runs a vein of undiluted
love for his native land. In his poem 'On the South Coast' he looks
out from 'the green, smooth-swelling downs' over the broad blue water,
and his thought is expressed in its final stanza:

Fair and dear is the land's face here, and fair man's work as a
man's may be:
Dear and fair as the sunbright air is here the record that speaks
him free;
Free by birth of a sacred earth, and regent ever o