The controversy had its humorous side; but we have no intention of stirring up again the smoke and fire of battles fought long ago. Mr. Swinburne held his ground defiantly, and the appearance of _Songs and Ballads_, published in 1871, showed no signs of contrition, or of concession to inveterate prejudices. In the course of the intervening five years the empire of Napoleon III. had fallen with a mighty crash; Italy had been united under one Italian dynasty; Garibaldi had become famous, and the Papal States had been absorbed into the Italian kingdom. This volume, which was dedicated to Joseph Mazzini, shows the ardent enthusiasm for the triumph of liberty, intellectual and political, which runs through all Mr. Swinburne's poetry. The 'Song of the Standard,' the 'Halt before Rome,' the 'Marching Song,' the 'Insurrection of Candia,' are poems that reflect current events; and the 'Litany of Nations' is the national anthem of peoples striving for freedom. But his verse rises to its highest pitch of exultation in the glorification of emancipation of Man. The final line of the 'Hymn to Man' is
'Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things';
and in one stanza of 'Hertha' is condensed all the wild declamation against deities and despots that pervades his poetry at this stage, with his joy in the deification of humanity:
'A creed is a rod, And a crown is of night; But this thing is God, To be man with thy might, To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life As the light.'
There are no love-lyrics in this volume. He now stands forth as the uncompromising enemy of established religions, a fierce assailant of tyrannies, spiritual or temporal, an iconoclast who denounces churches and tabernacles, priests and kings, the Roman Pope and the Jewish Jehovah; one for whom the Papacy is, as it was to Hobbes, the Kingdom of Darkness, its record blotted with tears and stained with blood, the 'grey spouse of Satan,' as he styled her in a later poem, sitting by a fire that is fed with the bones of her victims. From this time forward he declares open war upon theology, and even upon Theism; he is the mortal foe of bigots and tyrants; his praise is for Giordano Bruno, for Pelagius the British monk, born by the northern sea; for Voltaire, for all who have fought and suffered in the cause of intellectual emancipation. The prevailing religious beliefs seem to him relics of mediæval superstition, sophistry, and metaphysic--he contrasts them with the bright and free nature worship of the old world; he is a bitter enemy of the lofty spiritualism, the mighty world-religion, before which the fair humanities of the _juventus mundi_ had faded away. His delight is in the virile qualities of the earlier civilisations, the patriotism, the heroic temper, the ardour for civic liberties, the Hellenic delight in noble form and in physical beauty. He is fretted by the restraint which Christian authority imposes upon the unruly affections of sinful men; he scorns the terrors of judgment to come, the prostration of the multitude before the threat of eternal punishment, and the promise of celestial recompense for terrestrial misery. Death is the 'sleep eternal in an eternal night'; and the one thing as certain as death is pleasure. He is the prophet of Hedonism; he is for giving the passions a loose rein, for drinking the wine of rapture to the lees before we lie