inburne released into new energies, new liberties, and new
movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who
know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English
heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical
bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his
genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels
the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But if the
practice of some of the poets succeeding him had tended to make it rigid
and tame again, Swinburne was a new liberator. He writes, when he ought,
with a finely appropriate regularity, as in the lovely line on the forest
glades

That fear the faun's and know the dryad's foot,

in which the rule is completely kept, every step of the five stepping
from the unaccented place to the accented without a tremor. (I must
again protest that I use the word "accent" in a sense that has come to be
adapted to English prosody, because it is so used by all writers on
English metre, and is therefore understood by the reader, but I think
"stress" the better word.) But having written this perfect
English-iambic line so wonderfully fit for the sensitive quiet of the
woods, he turns the page to the onslaught of such lines--heroic lines
with a difference--as report the short-breathed messenger's reply to
Althea's question by whose hands the boar of Calydon had died:

A maiden's and a prophet's and thy son's.

It is lamentable that in his latest blank verse Swinburne should have
made a trick and a manner of that most energetic device of his by which
he leads the line at a rush from the first syllable to the tenth, and on
to the first of the line succeeding, with a great recoil to follow, as
though a rider brought a horse to his haunches. It is in the same boar
hunt:

And fiery with invasive eyes,
And bristling with intolerable hair,
Plunged;--

Sometimes we may be troubled with a misgiving that Swinburne's fine
narrative, as well as his descriptive writing of other kinds, has a
counterpart in the programme-music of some now bygone composers. It is
even too descriptive, too imitative of things, and seems to out-run the
province of words, somewhat as that did the province of notes. But,
though this hunting, and checking, and floating, and flying in metre may
be to strain the arts of prosody and diction, with how masterly a hand is
the straini