'Deep in dim death, beneath the grass Where no thought stings.'
Nevertheless, as the years go on, the note of regret and despair quiets down, the restless spirit of the poet is subdued to the calmer influences of nature; the charm of scenery, the association of places with memories more frequently bring softer inspirations. In his earlier poems his imaginative power found full scope in rendering the impressions of natural beauty, the glory of elemental strife; as in the 'Songs of the Four Seasons,' where the approach of a storm from the sea is likened to a descent of the Norse pirates on to the peaceful coast, and the metaphor produces a spirited picture:
'As men's cheeks faded On shores invaded When shorewards waded The lords of fight; When churl and craven Saw hard on haven The wide-winged raven At mainmast height; When monks affrighted To windward sighted The birds full-flighted Of swift sea-kings; So earth turns paler When Storm the sailor Steers in with a roar in the race of his wings.'
But more frequently the outlook on sea and land induces reverie, vague yearnings, retrospective sadness, and, like all true artists, he transposes into the landscape his own personal emotions, what he sees, feels, and remembers. In the poem of 'Hesperia' the view of the sunset over the sea stirs tender memories; the 'deep-tide wind blowing in with the water' seems to be wafting his absent love back to him, and his heart floats out toward her 'as the refluent seaweed moves in the languid exuberant stream.' In such pieces the fierce amorous obsession has been shaken off; he is no longer vexed by Shakespeare's[32] hyperbolic fiend, his mood is comparatively gentle and pathetic, as in the beautiful verses of 'A Forsaken Garden,' where his consummate faculty of metrical expression, wherein sense and sound are matched and inseparable, reaches, perhaps, its highest watermark:
'Over the meadows that blossom and wither Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song; Only the sun and the rain come hither All year long.'
In the series of landscape sketches grouped under the title of _A Midsummer Holiday_, published nearly twenty years after the _Poems and Ballads_, the treatment of his subject has become more impersonal. The impression or idea is still coloured by transmission through the spectator's mind. Mr. Swinburne has himself observed, very truly, that