We seem, therefore, to be in the presence of a curious phenomenon. Whereas in the case of most poets the general outline of the work precedes the execution of it in detail, Swinburne offers us the paradox of an execution carried to the utmost finish before the act of evolution begins. He takes a bag-ful of couplets, all polished to the finest point, and--on some subsequent occasion--he builds these up into a poem which has the aspect of inevitable growth. The First Draft of _Anactoria_, which I have attempted to describe, is totally unintelligible, a chaos of Rodin-like fragments, unless we accept this theory of the poet's method. One point remains to be stated. The published text of _Anactoria_ contains 304 lines. Of these I have found, scattered over the tract of delirious manuscript, 270. It is curious that not a single verse should have been added by the poet when he came to distribute and arrange his cluster of couplets, the solitary accession to the text being the solid passage of 34 lines in the middle of the poem, beginning Or say what God above all gods and years With offering and blood-sacrifice of tears. Of this, not a single trace is to be found in the Draft. My first supposition was that the sheet containing these lines was lost, as might well be when we consider the accidental and fortuitous way in which the rest was retrieved. But I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The text in the Draft stops at the line _The mystery of the cruelty of things_ without any sign that the idea of the impassive harshness of Fate was to be expanded. The 34 lines which now follow have, moreover, a character that distinguishes them from the rest of _Anactoria_, with which they are not quite in keeping. They leave the individual passion of Sappho entirely out of sight, and they are instinct with an order of theological ideas which occupied Swinburne in 1864 and 1865, when he was writing _Atalanta in Calydon_ and the earliest of _Songs before Sunrise_. They are on a higher philosophical plane than the melodious ravings of the love-sick poetess, and the more we read them, the more may we be persuaded that they are an after-thought. THE HÔTEL DE RAMBOUILLET