rds, to the streets, reappears as "Miss Kitty," and is accorded
some respectable rank. Under these conditions she becomes the object of
much princely devotion; but the moral hypocrisy of England has branded
her as a public scandal. With regard to her so-called depravities nobody
entertains a doubt, but one princely admirer, of broader mind than the
rest, declares that in spite of these she is really the embodiment of
everything that is divine in woman. "She may," he says, "have done
everything which might have made a Messalina blush, but whenever she
looked at the sky she murmured 'God,' and whenever she looked at a
flower she murmured 'mother.'"

The vivacity and mischievous humor with which Swinburne gave his account
of this projected play exhibited a side of his character which I have
never even seen mentioned, and the appreciation and surprise of his
audience were obviously a great delight to him. He lay back in his
chair, tossed off a glass of port, and presently his mood changed.
Somehow or other he got to his own serious poems; and before we knew
where we were he was pouring out an account of _Poems and Ballads_, and
explaining their relation to the secrets of his own experiences. There
were three poems, he said, which beyond all the rest were biographical:
"The Triumph of Time," "Dolores," and "The Garden of Proserpine." "The
Triumph of Time" was a monument to the sole real love of his life--a
love which had been the tragic destruction of all his faith in woman.
"Dolores" expressed the passion with which he had sought relief, in the
madnesses of the fleshly Venus, from his ruined dreams of the heavenly.
"The Garden of Proserpine" expressed his revolt against the flesh and
its fevers, and his longing to find a refuge from them in a haven of
undisturbed rest. His audience, who knew these three poems by heart,
held their breaths as they listened to the poet's own voice, imparting
its living tones to passages such as the following--

This is from "The Triumph of Time":

"I will say no word that a man may say,
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been, and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be."

This is from "Dolores":

"Oh, garment not golden but gilded,
Oh, garden where all men may dwell,
Oh, tower not of ivory, but builded
By hands that reach heaven out of hell."

This is from "The Garden of Proserpine":

"From