It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars, but it is good also to have the feet well planted on earth. If another example of Swinburne's abstraction from human interest were desired, one might take that rhapsody of the wind-beaten waters and "land that is lonelier than ruin," called _By the North Sea_. The picture of desolate and barren waste is one of the most powerful creations in his later works (it was published in 1880), yet there is still something wanting to stamp the impression into the mind. You turn from it, perhaps, to Browning's similar description in _Childe Roland_ and the reason is at once clear. You come upon the line: "One stiff, blind horse, his every bone a-stare," and pause. There is in Swinburne's poem no single touch which arrests the attention in this way, concentrating the effect, as it were, to a burning point, and bringing out the symbolic relation to human life. Yet I cannot pass from this subject without noticing what may appear a paradoxical phase of Swinburne's character. Only when he lowers his gaze from the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition to the instinctive ways of little children does his art become purely human. It would be easy to select a full dozen of the poems dealing with child-life and the tender love inspired by a child that touch the heart with their pure and chastened beauty. I should feel that an essential element of his art were left unremarked if I failed to quote some such examples as these two roundels on _First Footsteps_ and a _A Baby's Death_: A little way, more soft and sweet Than fields aflower with May, A babe's feet, venturing, scarce complete A little way. Eyes full of dawning day Look up for mother's eyes to meet, Too blithe for song to say. Glad as the golden spring to greet Its first live leaflet's play, Love, laughing, leads the little feet A little way. * * * * * The little feet that never trod Earth, never strayed in field or street, What hand leads upward back to God The little feet? A rose in June's most honied heat, When life makes keen the kindling sod, Was not more soft and warm and sweet. Their pilgrimage's period A few swift moons have seen complete Since mother's hands first clasped and shod The little feet. Despite the artificiality of the French form and a kind of revolving dizziness of movement, one catches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of feeling not unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet! that such long years." Swinburne himself might not relish the comparison, which is none the less just.