poet of eager, open capacity, this poet
who is little more, intellectually, than a too-ready, too-vacant
capacity, for those three august seventies has not room enough.

Charged, then, with other men's purposes--this man's Italian patriotism;
this man's love of sin (by that name, for sin has been denied, as a
fiction, but Swinburne, following Baudelaire, acknowledges it to love
it); this man's despite against the Third Empire or what not; this man's
cry for a political liberty granted or gained long ago--a cry grown vain;
this man's contempt for the Boers--nay, was it so much as a man, with a
man's evil to answer for, that furnished him here; was it not rather that
less guilty judge, the crowd?--this man's--nay, this boy's--erotic
sickness, or his cruelty--charged with all these, Swinburne's poetry is
primed; it explodes with thunder and fire. But such sharing is somewhat
too familiar for dignity; such community of goods parodies the
Franciscans. As one friar goes darned for another's rending, having no
property in cassock or cowl, so does many a poet, not in humility, but in
a paradox of pride, boast of the past of others. And yet one might
rather choose to make use of one's fellow-men's old shoes than to put
their old secrets to usufruct, and dress poetry in a motley of shed
passions, twice corrupt. Promiscuity of love we have heard of; Pope was
accused, by Lord Hervey's indignation and wit, of promiscuity of hatred,
and of scattering his disfavours in the stews of an indiscriminate
malignity; and here is another promiscuity--that of memories, and of a
licence partaken.

But by the unanimous poets' splendid love of the landscape and the skies,
by this also was Swinburne possessed, and in this he triumphed. By this,
indeed, he profited; here he joined an innumerable company of that
heavenly host of earth. Let us acknowledge then his honourable alacrity
here, his quick fellowship, his agile adoption, and his filial
tenderness--nay, his fraternal union with his poets. No tourist's
admiration for all things French, no tourist's politics in Italy--and
Swinburne's French and Italian admirations have the tourist manner of
enthusiasm--prompts him here. Here he aspires to brotherhood with the
supreme poets of supreme England, with the sixteenth century, the
seventeenth, and the nineteenth, the impassioned centuries of song. Happy
is he to be admitted among these, happy is he to merit by his wonderful
voice to sing t