'The mistress and mother of pleasure, The one thing as certain as death'--
yet it gave the British public no fair warning of what followed almost immediately.
Into the midst of a well-regulated, self-respecting modern society, much moved by Tennyson's 'Idylls,' and altogether sympathetic with the misfortunes of the blameless king--justly appreciative of the domestic affection so tenderly portrayed by Coventry Patmore's 'Angel in the House'--Mr. Swinburne charged impetuously with his _Poems and Ballads_, waving the banner of revolt against conventional reticence, kicking over screens and rending drapery--a reckless votary of Astarte, chanting the 'Laus Veneris' and the worship of 'Dolores, Our Lady of Pain.' From the calm and bright aspect of paganism he is turning toward its darker side, to the mystic rites and symbolism which cloaked the fierce primitive impulses of the natural man. The burden of these first poems is chiefly the bitter sweetness of love, the sighs and transports of those who writhe in the embrace of the dread goddess, known by many names in all lands, or the glory of man's brief springtide, when the veins are hot, soon to be cooled and covered by frost and fallen leaves. In the clear ringing stanzas of the 'Triumph of Time,' who sweeps away the brief summer of lovers' delight, bringing them to autumnal regrets 'for days that are over and dreams that are done,' and lastly to wintry oblivion, we have almost a surfeit of voluptuous melancholy. In this, as in other poems, the sea, changeful in mood, alternately fair and fierce, a bright smiling surface covering a thousand graves, fascinating and treacherous, is the mythical Aphrodite, the fatal woman, merciless to men. All this is set out in lyrics which amaze the reader by their exuberance of language, profusion of metaphor, and classic allusion; in rhymes that strike on the ear like the clashing of cymbals. It is as if Atys and his wild Mænads were flying through the quiet English woodlands. The long-drawn, undulating lines, in a quieter strain, of the 'Hymn to Proserpine' and of 'Hesperia,' with their subtle music, lay the reader under their charm; but too many of these poems are tainted by a flavour of morbidity, and the average Englishman is not easily thrown by the most potent spells into a state of amorous delirium.