rd of wonder.

Not, of course, that he had achieved a feat of longevity. He was
far from the Psalmist's limit. Nor was he one of those men whom one
associates with the era in which they happened to be young. Indeed, if
there was one man belonging less than any other to Mid-Victorian days,
Swinburne was that man. But by the calendar it was in those days that he
had blazed--blazed forth with so unexampled a suddenness of splendour;
and in the light of that conflagration all that he had since done, much
and magnificent though this was, paled. The essential Swinburne was
still the earliest. He was and would always be the flammiferous boy of
the dim past--a legendary creature, sole kin to the phoenix. It had been
impossible that he should ever surpass himself in the artistry that
was from the outset his; impossible that he should bring forth rhythms
lovelier and greater than those early rhythms, or exercise over them a
mastery more than--absolute. Also, it had been impossible that the first
wild ardour of spirit should abide unsinkingly in him. Youth goes. And
there was not in Swinburne that basis on which a man may in his maturity
so build as to make good, in some degree, the loss of what is gone.
He was not a thinker: his mind rose ever away from reason to rhapsody;
neither was he human. He was a king crowned but not throned. He was
a singing bird that could build no nest. He was a youth who could
not afford to age. Had he died young, literature would have lost many
glories; but none so great as the glories he had already given, nor any
such as we should fondly imagine ourselves bereft of by his early death.
A great part of Keats' fame rests on our assumption of what he would
have done. But--even granting that Keats may have had in him more than
had Swinburne of stuff for development--I believe that had he lived on
we should think of him as author of the poems that in fact we know. Not
philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is
the primal thing in poetry. Ideas, and flesh and blood, are but reserves
to be brought up when the poet's youth is going. When the bird can no
longer sing in flight, let the nest be ready. After the king has dazzled
us with his crown, let him have something to sit down on. But the
session on throne or in nest is not the divine period. Had Swinburne's
genius been of the kind that solidifies, he would yet at the close of
the nineteenth century have been for us young men vi