the writer who has put more Southern colouring into English verse than any other English poet: This sun--no sun like ours--burns out my soul. I would, when June takes hold on us like fire, The wind could waft and whirl us northward: here The splendour and the sweetness of the world Eat out all joy of life or manhood. Earth Is here too hard on heaven--the Italian air Too bright to breathe, as fire, its next of kin, Too keen to handle. God, whoe'er God be, Keep us from withering as the lords of Rome-- Slackening and sickening toward the imperious end That wiped them out of empire! Yea, he shall. The atmosphere of the play is that of June at Verona, and the sun's heat seems to beat upon us all through its brief and fevered action. Swinburne's words never make pictures, but they are unparalleled in their power of conveying atmosphere. He sees with a certain generalised vision--it might almost be said that he sees musically; but no English poet has ever presented bodily sensation with such curious and subtle intensity. And just as he renders bodily sensation carried to the point of agony, so he is at his best when dealing, as here, with emotion tortured to the last limit of endurance. Albovine, the king, sets bare his heart, confessing: The devil and God are crying in either ear One murderous word for ever, night and day, Dark day and deadly night and deadly day, Can she love thee who slewest her father? I Love her. Rosamund, his wife, meditating her monstrous revenge, confesses: I am yet alive to question if I live And wonder what may ever bid me die. ... There is nought Left in the range and record of the world For me that is not poisoned: even my heart Is all envenomed in me. And she recognises that No healing and no help for life on earth Hath God or man found out save death and sleep. The two young lovers, caught innocently in a net of intolerable shame, can but question and answer one another thus: HILDEGARD. Hast thou forgiven me? ALMACHILDES. I have not forgiven God. And at the end Narsetes, the old councillor, the only one of the persons of the drama who is not the actor or the sufferer of some subtle horror, sums up all that has happened in a reflection which casts the responsibility of things further off than to the edge of the world: Let none make moan. This doom is none of man's. As in the time of the great first volume of _Poems and Ballads_, Swinburne is still drawn to see What fools God's anger makes of men.