along with denunciations,
as there are on so many pages of the _Songs before Sunrise_ and the
_Songs of Two Nations_, in which the effect is far less convincing, as
it is far less clear. Whether Mazzini or Nelson be praised, Napoleon
III. or Gladstone be buffeted, little distinction, save of degree, can
be discerned between the one and the other. The hate poems, it must be
admitted, are more interesting, partly because they are more
distinguishable, than the poems of adoration; for hate seizes upon the
lineaments which love glorifies willingly out of recognition. There was
a finely ferocious energy in the _Dirae_ ending with _The Descent into
Hell_ of 9th January 1873, and there is a good swinging and slashing
vigour in _The Commonweal_ of 1886. Why is it that this deeply felt
political verse, like so much of the political verse of the _Songs
before Sunrise_, does not satisfy the ear or the mind like the early
love poetry or the later nature poetry? Is it not that one distinguishes
only a voice, not a personality behind the voice? Speech needs weight,
though song only needs wings.

I set the trumpet to my lips and blow,

said Swinburne in the _Songs before Sunrise,_ when he was the trumpeter
of Mazzini.

And yet, it must be remembered, Swinburne has always meant exactly what
he has said, and this fact points an amusing contrast between the
attitude of the critics thirty years ago towards work which was then new
and their attitude now towards the same work when it is thirty years
old. There is, in the _Songs before Sunrise_, an arraignment of
Christianity as deliberate as Leconte de Lisle's, as wholesale as
Nietzsche's; in the _Poems and Ballads_, a learned sensuality without
parallel in English poetry; and the critics, or the descendants of the
critics, who, when these poems first appeared, could see nothing but
these accidental qualities of substance, are now, thanks merely to the
triumph of time, to the ease with which time forgets and forgives, able
to take all such things for granted, and to acknowledge the genuine and
essential qualities of lyric exaltation and generous love of liberty by
which the poems exist, and have a right to exist, as poems. But when we
are told that _Before a Crucifix_ is a poem fundamentally reverent
towards Christianity, and that _Anactoria_ is an ascetic experiment in
scholarship, a learned attempt at the reconstruction of the order of
Sappho, it is difficult not to wonder wit