,

* * * * *

Honour not hate we give you, love not fear,
Last prophets of past kind, who fill the dome
Of great dead Gods with wrath and wail, nor hear
Time's word and man's: "Go honoured hence, go home,
Night's childless children; here your hour is done;
Pass with the stars, and leave us with the sun."'

The concise energy of these lines, their slow metrical movement,
invest them with singular weight and dignity. The poet is confronting
two representatives, in principle, of Force and Authority, whose
prototypes in bygone times would undoubtedly have sent him to the
scaffold or to the stake; nor is it improbable that both Carlyle and
Newman, though in all other opinions they differed widely, would have
agreed that a revolutionary firebrand and a pestilent infidel
deserved some such fate. The poet might console himself with the
reflection that they must have abhorred each other's principles quite
as much as they detested his own.

In his later verse Mr. Swinburne still continues to wield his flaming
sword against priests and despots, against intellectual and political
servility. What may be termed the historical plea, the excuse for
ideas and institutions that they are the relics of evil days long
past, is no palliation for them to his mind; he would stamp them out
and utterly destroy them. In this respect his temperament has
unconsciously a strong tincture of the intolerance which he denounces;
he would sweep away Christianity as Christianity swept away
polytheism. Toward its Founder, as the type of human love and purity,
he is uniformly reverential; there is nothing in that supreme figure
that jars with that Religion of Humanity, which 'The Altar of
Righteousness' proclaims with high dithyrambic enthusiasm:

'Christ the man lives yet, remembered of man as dreams that leave
Light on eyes that wake and know not if memory bids them grieve.

* * * * *

Far above all wars and gospels, all ebb and flow of time,
Lives the soul that speaks in silence, and makes mute the earth
sublime.'

But of theology reigning by force and terror he is the implacable
enemy; and his intemperate violence leaves a stain on the bright
radiance of his poetry. It amounts to an artistic fault, undiminished
even in the later years which should have brought the philosophic
mind. Moreover, it has materially lessened the influence which