ere out upon the
tiles, then, and his was the luminous, expressive silence of a sphere.
One felt, "whether he received it or no, here is the man who can wear
the crown."

And Her Tendency towards Abstractions.

It was not, however, the aloofness of Mr. Swinburne's bearing that
checked the formation of a Swinburnian school of poetry. The cause lay
deeper, and has come more and more into the light in the course of Mr.
Swinburne's poetic development--let me say, his thoroughly normal
development. We can see now that from the first such a school, such a
successful following, was an impossibility. The fact is that Mr.
Swinburne has not only genius, but an extremely rare and individual
genius. The germ of this individuality may be found, easily enough, in
"Atalanta" and the Ballads; but it luxuriates in his later poems and
throughout them--flower and leaf and stem. It was hardly more natural
in 1870 to confess the magic of the great chorus, "Before the
beginning of years," or of "Dolores," than to embark upon the vain
adventure of imitating them. I cannot imagine a youth in all Great
Britain so green or unknowing as to attempt an imitation of "A
Nympholept," perhaps the finest poem in the volume before me.

I say "in Great Britain;" because peculiar as Mr. Swinburne's genius
would be in any country, it is doubly peculiar as the endowment of an
English poet. If there be one quality beloved above others by the
inhabitants of this island, it is concreteness; and I suppose there
never was a poet in the world who used less concreteness of speech
than Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Palgrave once noted that the landscape of
Keats falls short of the landscape of Shelley in its comparative lack
of the larger features of sky and earth; Keats's was "foreground work"
for the most part. But what shall be said of Shelley's universe after
the immense vague regions inhabited by Mr. Swinburne's muse? She sings
of the sea; but we never behold a sail, never a harbor: she sings of
passion--among the stars. We seem never to touch earth; page after
page is full of thought--for, vast as the strain may be, it is never
empty--but we cannot apply it. And all this is extremely distressing
to the Briton, who loves practice as his birthright. He comes on a
Jacobite song. "Now, at any rate," he tells himself, "we arrive at
something definite: some allusion, however small, to Bonny Prince
Charlie." He reads--

"Faith speaks when hope dissembles;
Fai