oems were or
were not the record of personal experience was debated with as much
solemn fury as if it really mattered in the very least. When a poem has
once been written, of what consequence is it to anybody whether it was
inspired by a line of Sappho or by a lady living round the corner? There
may be theoretical preferences, and these may be rationally enough
argued, as to whether one should work from life or from memory or from
imagination. But, the poem once written, only one question remains: is
it a good or a bad poem? A poem of Coleridge or of Wordsworth is neither
better nor worse because it came to the one in a dream and to the other
in 'a storm, worse if possible, in which the pony could (or would) only
make his way slantwise.' The knowledge of the circumstances or the
antecedents of composition is, no doubt, as gratifying to human
curiosity as the personal paragraphs in the newspapers; it can hardly
be of much greater importance.

A passage in Swinburne's dedicatory epistle which was well worth saying,
a passage which comes with doubled force from a poet who is also a
scholar, is that on books which are living things: 'Marlowe and
Shakespeare, AEschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty
shelves of libraries.' To Swinburne, as he says, the distinction between
books and life is but a 'dullard's distinction,' and it may justly be
said of him that it is with an equal instinct and an equal enthusiasm
that he is drawn to whatever in nature, in men, in books, or in ideas is
great, noble, and heroic. The old name of _Laudi_, which has lately been
revived by d'Annunzio, might be given to the larger part of Swinburne's
lyric verse: it is filled by a great praising of the universe. To the
prose-minded reader who reads verse in the intervals of newspaper and
business there must be an actual fatigue in merely listening to so
unintermittent a hymn of thanksgiving. Here is a poet, he must say, who
is without any moderation at all; birds at dawn, praising light, are not
more troublesome to a sleeper.

Reading the earlier and the later Swinburne on a high rock around which
the sea is washing, one is struck by the way in which these cadences, in
their unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm of
the sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, a
rhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebuked
by the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked