It was then that Watts-Dunton took charge of his affairs once for all, and turned his country house into a sort of literary sanitarium, and kept the poet for thirty years, strictly forbidding any but respectable citizens to call upon him. Here the queer little parrakeet hopped about in the library, and gradually grew old and deaf, and wrote a great deal of prose and verse of little consequence. Some critics fight with the moralists over the question, Is it better for a poet to die drunk and inspired, or to live sober and dull? My friend, George Sterling, writes me on this point: “I still refuse, probably from personal experience, to believe that alcohol helps the artist to function at his best.” Swinburne’s first great work, published at the age of twenty-eight, was an imitation Greek play, “Atalanta in Calydon.” As poetry it is marvelous; nobody since Shelley had poured out such a torrent of glorious words. All the tricks of the trade are in it--how many you can learn from Professor Saintsbury, who lists them: “equivalence and substitution, alternative and repetition, rhymes and rhymeless suspension of sound, volley and check of verse, stanza construction, line-and pause-moulding, foot-conjunction and contrast.” Such are the weapons in the armory of those who have read all the poetry there is in the world! What else is there beside verbal splendor and technical tricks? The answer is: The familiar Greek aristocratic personages, struggling in vain against their gods; the old Greek fatalism and pessimism, taken up as a literary exercise and carried to un-Hellenic extremes. It might have puzzled you, perhaps, that a poet of republicanism and revolt should also be a poet of pessimism; but you would have been ill-advised to ask the question of Swinburne, for once, when a friend ventured to criticize his work, he stared for a moment or two of horror, then uttered a shrill scream, and rushed upstairs to his room, and seized his manuscript and spent hours tearing it into shreds and throwing it into the fire--and then spent the rest of the night rewriting it from memory! Swinburne could not think, he could only feel, and so he was capable of pouring his poetic frenzy into absolutely contradictory ideas. So we have these magnificent choruses of “Atalanta,” in which man’s despair at his own fate is voiced with overwhelming poignancy: For a day and a night and a morrow, That his strength might endure for a span With travail and heavy sorrow, The holy spirit of man.... He weaves, and is clothed with derision; Sows, and he shall not reap; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep.