To Swinburne the simplicity of nature included the utmost lengths to which eroticism could go. Upon this ground he has been severely censured and he has had an unfortunate influence upon scores and scores of younger writers who have seemed to think that the province of the poet is to decry the existence of sincere affection, and who in their turn have exercised actual mischief in lowering social standards. This is not all of Swinburne, however. His superb metrical power is his chief contribution to the originality of this group, and when he developed away from his nauseating eroticism, he could charm as no one else with his delicious music, though it often be conspicuous for its lack of richness in thought. His fate has been somewhat different from that of most poets. When his "Atalanta in Calydon" was published it was received with enthusiasm, but the volumes overweighted with eroticism which followed caused a fierce controversy, and many have not even yet discovered that this was only one phase of Swinburne's art, and that, unfortunate as it is in many respects, it was a phase of the century's life which must find its expression in art if that life is to be completely given, and that it was a passing phase Swinburne himself proved in the development of other phases shown in his interest in current political situations, his enthusiasm for Italy and his later expressions of high moral ideals, as well as in a quasi-religious attitude of mind, not so far from that of Emerson, himself, in which strong emphasis is placed upon the importance of the individual, and upon the unity of God and man. There is moral courage and optimism in the face of doubt of a high order in the following lines: --"Are ye not weary and faint not by the way Seeing night by night devoured of day by day, Seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire? Sleepless; and ye too, when shall ye, too sleep? --We are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet, And surely more than all things sleep were sweet, Than all things save the inexorable desire Which whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep. "Is this so sweet that one were fain to follow? Is this so sure when all men's hopes are hollow, Even this your dream, that by much tribulation Ye shall make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight? --Nay though our life were blind, our death were fruitless, Not therefore were the whole world's high hope rootless; But man to man, nation would turn to nation, And the old life live, and the old great word be great." But Swinburne in his farthest reaches of pantheistic aspiration is to be seen in a poem like "Hertha": "I am that which began; Out of me the years roll; Out of me God and man; I am equal and whole; God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.