A poet so great as Swinburne, possessed by an ecstasy which turns into song as instinctively as the flawless inspiration of Mozart turned into divine melody, cannot be questioned. Mozart, without a special genius for dramatic music, wrote _Die Zauberfloete_ to a bad libretto with as great a perfection as the music to _Don Giovanni_, which had a good one. The same inspiration was there, always apt to the occasion. Swinburne is ready to write in any known form of verse, with an equal facility and (this is the all-important point) the same inspiration. Loving the form of the drama, and capable of turning it to his uses, not of bending it to its own, he has filled play after play with music, noble feeling, brave eloquence. Here in this briefest and most actual of his plays--an act, an episode--he has concentrated much of this floating beauty, this overflowing imagination, into a few stern and adequate words, and made a new thing, as always, in his own image. It is the irony that has given its precise form to this representation of a twofold Satan, as Blake might have seen him in vision, parodying God with unbreakable pride. The conflict between father and son ends in a kind of unholy litany. 'And now,' cries Caesar, fresh from murder, Behoves thee rise again as Christ our God, Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away This grief from off thy godhead. And the old man, temporising with his grief, answers: Thou art subtle and strong. I would thou hadst spared him--couldst have spared him. And the son replies: Sire, I would so too. Our sire, his sire and mine, I slew him not for lust of slaying, or hate, Or aught less like thy wiser spirit and mine. But Caesar-Satan has already said the epilogue to the whole representation, when, speaking to his mother, he bids her leave the responsibility of things: And God, who made me and my sire and thee, May take the charge upon him. 1899-1908. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI Rossetti's phrase about poetry, that it must be 'amusing'; his 'commandment' about verse translation, 'that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one'; his roughest and most random criticisms about poets, are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse. Only Coleridge among English poets has anything like the same definite grasp upon whatever is essential in poetry. And it is this intellectual sanity partly, this complete knowledge of the medium in which he worked, that has given Rossetti a position of his own, a kind of leadership in art. And, technically, Rossetti has done much for English poetry. Such a line as And when the night-vigil was done,