And yet there is no doubt that Swinburne has made his own moulds of language, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt, when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs to him, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead of creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated, he misses the naive quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version not in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtle way, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will not stop to think that 'wife,' though a good word for his rhyme scheme, is not a word that Villon could have used, and that Deux estions et n'avions qu'ung cueur, though it is perfectly rendered by Rossetti in Two we were and the heart was one, is turned into a wholly different, a Swinburnian thing, by Twain we were, and our hearts one song, One heart. Nor is 'Dead as the carver's figured throng' (for 'Comme les images, par cueur') either clear in meaning, or characteristic of Villon in form. Is it not one of the penalties of extreme technical ability that the hand at times works, as it were, blindly, without the delicate vigilance or direction of the brain? Of the poems contained in this new volume, the title-poem, _A Channel Passage_, is perhaps the finest. It is the record of a memory, fifty years old, and it is filled with a passionate ecstasy in the recollection of Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal joy, Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's heart in a boy. It may be that Swinburne has praised the sea more eloquently, or sung of it more melodiously, but not in the whole of his works is there a poem fuller of personal rapture in the communion of body and soul with the very soul of the sea in storm. _The Lake of Gaube_ is remarkable for an exultant and very definite and direct rendering of the sensation of a dive through deep water. There are other sea-poems in the two brief and concentrated poems in honour of Nelson; the most delicate of the poems of flowers in _A Rosary_; the most passionate and memorable of the political poems in _Russia: an Ode_; the Elizabethan prologues. These poems, so varied in subject and manner, are the work of many years; to those who love Swinburne most as a lyric poet they will come with special delight, for they represent, in almost absolute equality, almost every side of his dazzling and unique lyric genius.