But then, if that be true, what is the use of struggling for liberty and overthrowing tyrants? What indeed is the use of writing beautiful verses and reading proofs and wrangling with publishers and critics? Manifestly, no use whatever. Nevertheless, Swinburne would read a news item about Napoleon the Little, and he would fly into another frenzy, and write a poem in which he called for the blood of tyrants. He collected all these into his “Songs before Sunrise,” which constitute one of the bibles of liberty. When I meet an art-for-art’s-saker, I never fail to ask him if he has read Swinburne’s “Prelude,” in which the poet describes his conversion to the cause of human service. Play then and sing; we too have played, We likewise, in that subtle shade. We too have twisted through our hair Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear, And heard what mirth the Mænads made. Such has been the poet’s life; but now he has reformed, and taken up the duty of passing on the light of the intelligence to his fellows: A little time that we may fill Or with such good works or such ill As loose the bonds or make them strong Wherein all manhood suffers wrong. And that leads us by a natural transition to the “Marching Song,” a battle-cry of the revolution: Rise, ere the dawn be risen; Come, and be all souls fed; From field and street and prison Come, for the feast is spread; Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead. “My other books are books,” Swinburne declared, “but ‘Songs before Sunrise’ is myself.” His respectable biographer, Edmund Gosse, is both puzzled and shocked by this, and points out how completely Swinburne’s hopes of republicanism have failed to be realized in the modern world. Yes; the poet failed to see that the lords of finance, the fat men of the bourgeoisie, would subsidize autocracy and subsidize superstition, as a means of riveting slavery upon the human mind and body for another century. But let Professor Gosse take care of his health for a few years more, and he may see that Daylight which was heralded in the “Songs before Sunrise.” We have stepped ahead of our story and omitted to mention Swinburne’s earlier volume of miscellaneous work, “Poems and Ballads,” which was published shortly after “Atalanta,” and gave the Victorian age the worst shock of its existence. This was the time of Tennyson at his most mawkish, the time of “Maud” and “Enoch Arden”; literary England had not seen anything really indecent since Byron’s “Don Juan,” nearly half a century ago. But here came this young aristocrat--the son of an admiral, and therefore beyond prosecution for anything that he might do--throwing out upon the world an inspired glorification of sexual and alcoholic riot.