I know that this digression is somewhat long, but I believe that it is of great importance; without knowing these facts, it would be impossible for the student to understand many curious things in Swinburne's manner. Throughout even his lighter poems we find this curious habit of describing things in ways totally remote from nineteenth century feeling, and nevertheless astonishingly effective. Fancy such comparisons as these for a woman's beauty in the correct age of Wordsworth: I said "she must be swift and white, And subtly warm, and half perverse, And sweet like sharp soft fruit to bite, And like a snake's love lithe and fierce." Men have guessed worse. Or take the following extraordinary description of a woman's name, perhaps I had better say of the sensation given by the name Félise, probably an abbreviation of Felicita, but by its spelling reminding one very much of the Latin word _felis_, which means a cat: Like colors in the sea, like flowers, Like a cat's splendid circled eyes That wax and wane with love for hours, Green as green flame, blue-grey like skies, And soft like sighs. The third line refers to the curious phenomenon of the enlarging and diminishing of the pupil in a cat's eye according to the decrease or increase of light. It is said that you can tell the time of day by looking at a cat's eyes. Now all these comparisons are in the highest degree offences against classical feeling. The classical poet, even the half-classical poet of the beginning of our own century, would have told you that a woman must not be compared to a snake or a cat; that you must not talk about her sweetness being like the sweetness of fruit, or the charm of her presence being like the smell of perfume. All such comparisons seemed monstrous, unnatural. If such a critic were asked why one must not compare a woman to a snake or a cat, the critic would probably answer, "Because a snake is a hateful reptile and a cat is a hateful animal." What would Ruskin or Swinburne then say to the critic? He would say simply, "Did you ever look at a snake? Did you ever study a cat?" The classicist would soon be convicted of utter ignorance about snakes and cats. He thought them hateful simply because it was not fashionable to admire them a hundred years ago. But the old poets of the early Middle Ages were not such fools. They had seen snakes and admired them, because for any man who is not prejudiced, a snake is a very beautiful creature, and its motions are as beautiful as geometry. If you do not think this is true, I beg of you to watch a snake, where its body can catch the light of the sun. Then there is no more graceful or friendly or more attractively intelligent animal than a cat. The common feeling about snakes and cats is not an artistic one, nor even a true one; it is of ethical origin, and unjust. These animals are not moral according to our notions; they seem cruel and