Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life, nor do the few other events recorded or the authentic anecdotes help us much to a more intimate knowledge of the man. Yet he has the ambiguous gift of awakening curiosity. Probably the first question most people ask on laying down his _Poems and Ballads_ (that _péché de jeunesse_, as he afterwards called it) is to know how much of the book is "true." Mr. Swinburne has expressed a becoming contempt for "the scornful or mournful censors who insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions of absolute fancy." One does not like to be classed among the _scornful or mournful_, and yet I should feel much easier in my appreciation of the _Poems and Ballads_ if I knew how far they were based on the actual experience of the author. The reader of Swinburne feels constantly as if his feet were swept from the earth and he were carried into a misty mid-region where blind currents of air beat hither and thither; he longs for some anchor to reality. In the later books this sensation becomes almost painful, and it is because the earlier publications, the _Atalanta_ and the first _Poems and Ballads_, contain more of definable human emotion, whatever their relation to fact may be, that they are likely to remain the most popular and significant of Swinburne's works. The publication of _Atalanta_ at the age of twenty-eight made him famous, _Poems and Ballads_ the next year made him almost infamous. The alarm aroused in England by _Dolores_ and _Faustine_ still vibrates in our ears as we repeat the wonderful rhythms. The impression is deepened by the remarkable unity of feeling that runs through these voluble songs--the feeling of infinite satiety. The satiety of the flesh hangs like a fatal web about the _Laus Veneris_; the satiety of disappointment clings "with sullen savour of poisonous pain" to _The Triumph of Time_; satiety speaks in the _Hymn to Proserpine_, with its regret for the passing of the old heathen gods; it seeks relief in the unnatural passion of _Anactoria_-- Clothed with deep eyelids under and above-- Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love; turns to the abominations of cruelty in _Faustine_; sings enchantingly of rest in _The Garden of Proserpine_-- Here, where the world is quiet, Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dreams of dreams; I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams. I am tired of tears and laughter, And men that laugh and weep, Of what may come hereafter For men that sow to reap: I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers, Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep.