_The Triumph of Time_, which Mr. Gosse maintains is "the most profound
and the most touching of all his personal poems." He assured Mr. Gosse,
fourteen years afterwards, that "the stanzas of this wonderful lyric
represented with the exactest fidelity the emotions which passed through
his mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but the
infinite pity and the pain." Beautiful though the poem intermittently
is, however, it seems to me to lack that radiance of personal emotion
which we find in the great love poems. There is much decoration of music
of a kind of which Swinburne and Poe alone possessed the secret, as in
the verse beginning:--

There lived in France a singer of old
By the tideless, dolorous, midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman and none but she.

But is there more than the decoration of music in the verses which
express the poet's last farewell to his passion?

I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
Fill the days of my daily breath
With fugitive things not good to treasure,
Do as the world doth, say as it saith;
But if we had loved each other--O sweet,
Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet,
The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure,
To feel you tread it to dust and death--

Ah, had I not taken my life up and given
All that life gives and the years let go,
The wine and honey, the balm and leaven,
The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?
Come life, come death, not a word be said;
Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?
I shall never tell you on earth, and in heaven,
If I cry to you then, will you care to know?

Browning, unquestionably, could have expressed Swinburne's passion
better than Swinburne did it himself. He would not have been content
with a sequence of vague phrases that made music. With him each phrase
would have been dramatic and charged with a personal image or a personal
memory.

Swinburne, however, was a great musician in verse and beyond
belittlement in this regard. It would be incongruous to attempt a close
comparison between him and Longfellow, but he was like Longfellow in
having a sense of music out of all proportion to the imaginative content
of his verse. There was never a distinguished poet whose work endures
logical analysis so badly. Mr. Arthur Symons, in a recent essay, refers
scornfully