ing
forward.

The symbolism which characterises a great deal of Pre-Raphaelite art is
not conspicuous in Swinburne, whose spirit is not mystical. But two
marks of the Pre-Raphaelite--and, indeed, of the romantic manner
generally--are obtrusively present in his early work. One of these is
the fondness for microscopic detail at the expense of the obvious,
natural outlines of the subject. Thus of Proserpine at Enna, in the
piece entitled "At Eleusis,"

"--she lying down, red flowers
Made their sharp little shadows on her sides."

"Endymion" is, perhaps, partly responsible for this exaggeration of the
picturesque, and in Swinburne, as in Keats, the habit is due to an
excessive impressibility by all forms of sensuous beauty. It is a sign
of riches, but of riches which smother their possessor. It is impossible
to fancy Chaucer or Goethe, or any large, healthy mind dealing thus by
its theme. Or, indeed, contrast the whole passage from "At Eleusis" with
the mention of the rape of Proserpine in the "Winter's Tale" and in
"Paradise Lost."

Another Pre-Raphaelite trait is that over-intensify of spirit and sense
which was not quite wholesome in Rossetti, but which manifested itself in
Swinburne in a morbid eroticism. The first series of "Poems and Ballads"
was reprinted in America as "Laus Veneris." The name-poem was a version
of the Tannhaeuser legend, a powerful but sultry study of animal passion,
and it set the key of the whole volume. It is hardly necessary to say of
the singer of the wonderful choruses in "Atalanta" and the equally
wonderful hexameters of "Hesperia," that his imagination has turned most
persistently to the antique, and that a very small share of his work is
to be brought under any narrowly romantic formula. But there are a few
noteworthy experiments in mediaevalism included among these early lyrics.
"A Christmas Carol" is a ballad of burdens, suggested by a drawing of
Rossetti's, and full of the Pre-Raphaelite colour. The inevitable
damsels, or bower maidens, are combing out the queen's hair with golden
combs, while she sings a song of God's mother; how she, too, had three
women for her bed-chamber--

"The first two were the two Maries,
The third was Magdalen," [58]

who "was the likest God"; and how Joseph, who, likewise had three
workmen, Peter, Paul, and John, said to the Virgin in regular ballad
style:

"If your child be none other man's,
But if it be very mine