Like a toad within a stone Seated while Time crumbles on; Which sits there since the earth was cursed For Man's transgression at the first-- and the difference is immediately apparent between that concentration of mind which sums up a thought in a single definite image and the fluctuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away by the intoxication of words. All that is true, and yet, somehow, out of this poem of _Dolores_ there does arise in the end a very real and memorable mood--real after the fashion of a mood excited by music rather than by painting or sculpture. The _Poems and Ballads_ are splendid but _malsain_; they are impressive and they have the strength, ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly or indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. The change on passing to the _Songs Before Sunrise_ (published in 1871) is extraordinary. During the five years that elapsed between these volumes the two master passions of Swinburne's life laid hold on him with devastating effect--the passion of Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Henceforth the influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugo was to dominate him like an obsession. Now, heaven forbid that one should say or think anything in despite of Liberty! The mere name conjures up recollections of glory and pride, and in it the hopes of the future are involved. And yet the very magnitude of its content renders it peculiarly liable to misuse. To this man it means one thing, and to another another, and many might cry out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue: "Thou art a naked word, and I followed thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" Certainly nothing is more dangerous for a poet than to fall into the habit of mouthing those great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and the like, abstracted of very definite events and very precise imagery. To Swinburne the sound of liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of frothing mania. It is true that one or two of the poems on this theme are lifted up with a superb and genuine lyric enthusiasm. The _Eve of Revolution_, for instance, with which the _Songs Before Sunrise_ open, rings with the stirring noise of trumpets: I hear the midnight on the mountains cry With many tongues of thunders, and I hear Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer, And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly, Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear....