m. Out of the
thunder and splendour of words he himself says nothing. We have often
had man's interpretation of Nature; now we have Nature's interpretation
of man, and she has curiously little to say. Force and Freedom form her
vague message. She deafens us with her clangours.

But Mr. Swinburne is not always riding the whirlwind and calling out of
the depths of the sea. Romantic ballads in Border dialect have not lost
their fascination for him, and this last volume contains some very
splendid examples of this curious artificial kind of poetry. The amount
of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament.
To say 'mither' instead of 'mother' seems to many the acme of romance.
There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of
provincialisms. There is, however, no doubt of Mr. Swinburne's mastery
over the form, whether the form be quite legitimate or not. The Weary
Wedding has the concentration and colour of a great drama, and the
quaintness of its style lends it something of the power of a grotesque.
The ballad of The Witch-Mother, a mediaeval Medea who slays her children
because her lord is faithless, is worth reading on account of its
horrible simplicity. The Bride's Tragedy, with its strange refrain of

In, in, out and in,
Blaws the wind and whirls the whin:

The Jacobite's Exile--

O lordly flow the Loire and Seine,
And loud the dark Durance:
But bonnier shine the braes of Tyne
Than a' the fields of France;
And the waves of Till that speak sae still
Gleam goodlier where they glance:

The Tyneside Widow and A Reiver's Neck-verse are all poems of fine
imaginative power, and some of them are terrible in their fierce
intensity of passion. There is no danger of English poetry narrowing
itself to a form so limited as the romantic ballad in dialect. It is of
too vital a growth for that. So we may welcome Mr. Swinburne's masterly
experiments with the hope that things which are inimitable will not be
imitated. The collection is completed by a few poems on children, some
sonnets, a threnody on John William Inchbold, and a lovely lyric entitled
The Interpreters.

In human thought have all things habitation;
Our days
Laugh, lower, and lighten past, and find no station
That stays.
But thought and faith are mightier things than time
Can wrong,
Made splendid once by speech, or made sublime
By song.