The dinner passed off pleasantly. Swinburne showed himself an intelligent, though by no means a brilliant, talker; and as soon as we had returned to the drawing room, where we drank a cup of coffee standing, Jowett, who had some engagement, abruptly left us to finish the evening by ourselves. On Swinburne the effect of the Master's disappearance was magical. His manner and aspect began to exhibit a change like that of the moon when a dim cloud drifts away from it. Of what we discussed at starting I have not the least remembrance, but before very long Swinburne was on the subject of poetry. His observations at first consisted of general criticisms. Then he began to indulge in quotations from various poems--none of them, I think, from his own; but, however this may have been, the music seemed to intoxicate him. The words began to thrill me with the spell of his own recitation of them. Here at last I realized the veritable genius who had made the English language a new instrument of passion. Here at last was the singer for whose songs my ears were shells which still murmured with such lines as I had first furtively read by the gaslight of the Brighton theater. My own appreciation as a listener more and more encouraged him. If he began a quotation sitting, he would start from his chair to finish it. Finally he abandoned the restraints of a chair altogether. He began, with gesticulating arms, to pace the room from one end to the other, reciting passage after passage, and appealing to me, who managed to keep pace with him, for applause. "The most beautiful lines that Tennyson ever wrote," he exclaimed, "were these, from 'Maud': "And like silent lightning under the stars She seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest. "Yes," he went on, "and what did the dream-Maud tell her lover when she had got him? That the salvation of the world depended on the Crimean War and the prosecution of Lord Palmerston's policy." Finally he strayed into quotations from Sidney Dobell, a writer now hardly remembered, with one of which, describing a girl bathing, he made the Master's academic rafters ring: "She, with her body bright sprinkles the waters white, Which flee from her fair form, and flee in vain, Dyed with the dear unutterable sight, And circles out her beauties to the circling main." He was almost shouting these words when another sound became audible--that of an opening door, followed by Jowett's voice, which said in high-pitched syllables, "You'd both of you better go to bed now."