But even here the reverberation of the words begins to conceal their meaning, and such abstractions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the worst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer hymns to liberty are nearly unreadable--at least if any one can endure to the end of _A Song of Italy_, it is not I. And as one goes through these rhapsodies that came out year after year, one begins to feel that Swinburne's notion of liberty, when it is not empty of meaning, is something even worse. Too often it is Kipling's gross idolatry of England uttered in a kind of hysterical falsetto. It was not pretty at a time of estrangement between England and France to speak of "French hounds whose necks are aching Still from the chain they crave"; and one needed not to sympathise with the Boers in the South African war to feel something like disgust at Swinburne's abuse: ....... the truth whose witness now draws near To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam, Down out of life. Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to a righteous and Miltonic indignation. The best criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints." I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's driving up late to a dinner and entering into a violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast amusement of the waiting guests within the house. That incorrigible wag and hanger-on of genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party and acted as chorus to the dialogue outside. "The poet's got the best of it, as usual," drawls the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in Cockspur Street, and never goes anywhere except in hansoms, which, whatever the distance, he invariably remunerates with one shilling. Consequently, when, as to-day, it's a case of two miles beyond the radius, there's the devil's own row; but in the matter of imprecation the poet is more than a match for cabby, who, after five minutes of it, gallops off as though he had been rated by Beelzebub himself." Really, 'tis a bit of gossip which may be taken as a comment on not a few of Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty. Not less noble in significance is that other word, the sea, which Swinburne now uses with endless reiteration. In his reverence for the weltering ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, he does of course only follow the best traditions of English poetry from _Beowulf_ to _The Seven Seas_ of Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. Nor is it the world of water alone that dominates his imagination, but with it the winds and the panorama of the sky ever rolling above. Already in the _Poems and Ballads_ there is a hint of the sympathy between the poet and this realm of water and air. One of the finest passages in _The Triumph of Time_ is that which begins: I will go back to the great sweet mother, Mother and lover of men, the sea. I will go down to her, I and none other, Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me.