But for the most part the atmosphere of those poems was too sultry for the salt spray of ocean, and it is only with the _Songs Before Sunrise_, with the obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are carried to the wide sea "that makes immortal motion to and fro," and to the "shrill, fierce climes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth the reader is like some wave-tossed mariner who should take refuge in the cave of Æolus; at least he is forced to admire the genius that presides over the gusty concourse: Hic vasto rex Æolus antro Luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras Imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat. Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis Circum claustra fremunt. The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might seem. There is a picture of Swinburne in the _Recollections_ of the late Henry Treffry Dunn which almost personifies him as the storm-king: It had been a very sultry day, and with the advancing twilight, heavy thunder-clouds were rolling up. The door opened and Swinburne entered. He appeared in an abstracted state, and for a few minutes sat silent. Soon, something I had said anent his last poem set his thoughts loose. Like the storm that had just broken, so he began in low tones to utter lines of poetry. As the storm increased, he got more and more excited and carried away by the impulse of his thoughts, bursting into a torrent of splendid verse that seemed like some grand air with the distant peals of thunder as an intermittent accompaniment. And still the storm waxed more violent, and the vivid flashes of lightning became more frequent. But Swinburne seemed unconscious of it all, and whilst he paced up and down the room, pouring out bursts of passionate declamation, faint electric sparks played round the wavy masses of his luxuriant hair.... Amidst the rattle of the thunder he still continued to pour out his thoughts, his voice now sinking low and sad, now waxing louder as the storm listed. The scattered poems in his later books that rise above the _Poems and Ballads_ with a kind of grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part filled with echoes of wind and water. That haunting picture of crumbling desolation, _A Forsaken Garden_, lies "at the sea-down's edge between windward and lee." One of the few poems that seem to contain the cry of a real experience, _At a Month's End_, combines this aspect of nature admirably with human emotion: Silent we went an hour together, Under grey skies by waters white. _Our hearts were full of windy weather, Clouds and blown stars and broken light._