Swinburne has no equal in enthusiastic celebration of the beauties of sky and sea and wood, of light and clouds and waters, of sound and perfume and blossoming. Indeed, one of his particular characteristics, a characteristic very seldom found in English masterpieces, though common in the best French work, is his art for describing odours--the smell of morning and evening, scents of the seasons, scents also of life. We shall have many opportunities to notice this characteristic of Swinburne, even in his descriptions of human beauty. What the French call the _parfum de jeunesse_ or odour of youth, the pleasant smell of young bodies, the perfume that we notice, for example, in the hair of a healthy child, is something which English writers very seldom venture to treat of; but Swinburne has treated it quite as delicately at times as a French poet could do, though sometimes a little extravagantly. You must think of him as one whom no quality of beauty escapes, whether of colour, odour, or motion; and as one who believes, I think rightly, that whatever is in itself beautiful and natural is worthy of song. You will be able to imagine, from what I have already quoted, how he feels in the presence of wild nature. How he considers human beauty is a more difficult matter to illustrate by quotation, at least by quotation before a class. But I shall try to offer some illustrations from the "Masque of Queen Bersabe." You all know what a masque is. The masque in question is a perfect imitation, for the most part, of a mediæval masque, both as to form and language. But there is one portion of it which is mediæval only in tone, not in language, since there never lived in the Middle Ages any man capable of writing such verse. It is from this part that I want to quote. But I must first explain to you that the name Bersabe is only a mediæval form of the Biblical name Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, whom King David caused to be murdered. It is an ugly story. The King committed adultery with Bathsheba; then he ordered her husband to be put into the front rank during a battle, in such a place that he must be killed. Afterwards the King married Bathsheba; but the prophet Nathan heard of the wickedness, and threatened the King with the punishment of God. This was the subject of several mediæval religious plays, and Swinburne adopted it for an imitation of such play. The first part of his conception is that at the command of the prophet the ghosts of all the beautiful and wicked queens who ever lived come before Bathsheba, to reproach her with her sin, and to tell her how they had been punished in other time for sins of the same kind. Each one speaks in turn; and though I cannot quote all of what they said, I can quote enough to illustrate the magnificence of the work. Each verse is a portrait in words, uttered by the subject. CLEOPATRA