"The dark dumb godhead innate in the fair world's life
Imbues the rapture of dawn and of noon with dread,
Infects the peace of the star-shod night with strife,
Informs with terror the sorrow that guards the dead.
No service of bended knee or of humbled head
May soothe or subdue the God who has change to wife:
And life with death is as morning with evening wed."
Take Burns's song, "It was a' for our right-fu' King," and set it
beside the Jacobite song quoted above, and it is clear at once that
with Mr. Swinburne we pass from the particular and concrete to the
general and abstract. And in this direction Mr. Swinburne's muse has
steadily marched. In his "Erechtheus" he tells how the gods gave
Pallas the lordship of Athens--
"The lordship and love of the lovely land,
The grace of the town that hath on it for crown
But a headband to wear
Of violets one-hued with her hair."
Here at least we were allowed a picture of Athens: the violet crown
was something definite. But now, when Mr. Swinburne sings of England,
we have to precipitate our impressions from lines fluid as these:--
"Things of night at her glance took flight: the
strengths of darkness recoiled and sank:
Sank the fires of the murderous pyres whereon wild
agony writhed and shrank:
Rose the light of the reign of right from gulfs of
years that the darkness drank."