Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow, How can thine heart be full of the spring? A thousand summers are over and dead. What hast thou found in the spring to follow? What hast thou found in thine heart to sing? What wilt thou do when the summer is shed? Probably Swinburne found this measure in early Middle English poetry; it was used by the old poet Hampole in his "Prick of Conscience." After it had been forgotten for five hundred years, Swinburne brought it to life again. Something very close to it forms the splendid and beautiful chorus of "Atalanta in Calydon": When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain; And the brown bright nightingale amorous Is half assuaged for Itylus, For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, The tongueless vigil, and all the pain. Here as in all other cases, however, the poet has far surpassed his model. The measures which he revived take new life only because of the extraordinary charm which he has put into them. Passing suddenly from these lighter structures, let us observe the great power which Swinburne manifests in another kind of revival, the sixteen syllable line. This is not a modern measure at all. It was used long ago, but was practically-abandoned and almost forgotten except by scholars when Swinburne revived it. Nor has he revived it only in one shape, but in a great many shapes, sometimes using single lines, sometimes double, or again varying the accent so as to make four or five different kinds of verse with the same number of syllables. The poem "The Armada" is a rich example of this re-animation and variation of the long dead form. In this poem Swinburne describes the god of Spain as opposed to the god of England, and the most forceful lines are those devoted to these conceptions. Observe the double rhymes. Ay, but _we_ that the wind and _sea_ gird round with shelter of storms and _waves_, Know not _him_ that ye worship, _grim_ as dreams that quicken from dead men's _graves_: God is _one_ with the sea, the _sun_, the land that nursed us, the love that _saves._ Love whose _heart_ is in ours, and _part_ of all things noble and all things _fair_: Sweet and _free_ as the circling _sea_, sublime and kind as the fostering _air_: Pure of _shame_ as is England's _name_, whose crowns to come are as crowns that _were._ Now we have, quite easily, a change in the measure. We have sixteen syllables still, but the whole music is changed. But the Lord of darkness, the God whose love is a flaming fire, The master whose mercy fulfils wide hell till its torturers tire, He shall surely have heed of his servants who serve him for love, not hire.