to discern that it would be of little use to dethrone King Log in favour of Prime Minister Stork, or to unfrock an Archbishop of Canterbury in order to transfer his authority to a General Booth. Hitherto it has been impossible not to feel that there has been some disproportion between Mr. Swinburne’s power of saying things and the things he has to say. This defect of the “body of thought,” which Coleridge once complained was wanting in an otherwise good poem, has reacted upon Mr. Swinburne’s language itself, producing sometimes a reiteration of words and imagery surpassing even that which is to be found in the works of Shelley, and which in them arose from the same inadequacy of matter. For example, in a passage of thirteen lines in the present volume we have “flowery forefront of the year,” “foam-flowered strand,” “blossom-fringe,” “flower-soft face,” and “spray-flowers”; and in Mr. Swinburne’s poems generally it must be confessed that flowers, stars, waves, flames and three or four other entities of the natural order, come in so often as to suggest some narrowness of observation and vocabulary. This defect, also, is less manifest than it used to be, though probably the abandonment to the mere joy of words, which is natural and not altogether ungraceful in a writer who can use them so splendidly, will always be a characteristic of Mr. Swinburne’s poetry. It reminds us of the rapture of Tristram in the truly magnificent description of the bath he took before breakfast in “Sea and Sunrise,” and the reader is often carried with like joy upon the waves of words without troubling himself as to whether he and the poet are not both out of their depth. Mr. Swinburne’s mode of dealing with human passions is somewhat of an anachronism. His heroes and heroines, like those of the old English drama and the Scandinavian poems, often become heroic by the sacrifice of humanity, and, thereby, of the reader’s sympathy. The pictures of Mary Queen of Scots and of Iseult in this volume, for instance, though painted with a great brush are not truly great, because they are not greatly true--at all events, to any conditions which the modern world recognises or should desire to recognise. Nor, granting that the characters and situations are poetical, is the execution quite what it ought to be. The effects are obtained by a cumulative rather than a developing process; and, at the end of a long poem or passage full of strong words and images, the idea of strength thence derived is rather that given by a hill than the living hole of a huge tree.