It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a large body of work in a phrase, yet with Swinburne we shall scarcely go astray if we seek such a characterisation in the one word _motion_. Both the beauty and the fault of his extraordinary rhythms are exposed in that term, and certainly his first claim to originality lies in his rhythmical innovations. There had been nothing in English comparable to the steady swell, like the waves of a subsiding sea, in the lines of _Atalanta_ and the _Poems and Ballads_. They brought a new sensuous pleasure into our poetry. But with time this cadenced movement developed into a kind of giddy race which too often left the reader belated and breathless. Little tricks of composition, such as a repeated cæsura after the seventh syllable of the pentameter, were employed to heighten the speed. Moreover, the longer lines in many of the poems are not organic, but consist of two or more short lines huddled together, the effect being to eliminate the natural resting-places afforded by the sense. And occasionally his metre is merely wanton. He uses one verse, for example, which with its combination of gliding motion and internal jingles is uncommonly irritating: Hills and _valleys_ where April _rallies_ his radiant squadron of flowers and _birds_, Steep strange _beaches_ and lustrous _reaches_ of fluctuant sea that the land _engirds_, Fields and _downs_ that the sunrise _crowns_ with life diviner than lives in _words_,-- a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle. And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest of English poets, it is due in large part to this same element of motion. A poem may move swiftly and still be perfectly easy to follow, so long as the thought is simple and concrete; witness the works of Longfellow. Or, on the other hand, the thought may be tortuous and still invite reflection, so long as the metre forces a continual pause in the reading; witness Browning. Now, no one will accuse Swinburne of overloading his pages with thought; it is not there the obscurity lies. The difficulty is with the number and the peculiarly vague quality of his metaphors. Let me illustrate what I mean by this vagueness. I open one of the volumes at random and my eye rests on this line in _A Channel Passage_: As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life or of sleep. If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke this image before his mind, he would certainly need to pause for a moment. Or I open to _Walter Savage Landor_ and find this passage marked: High from his throne in heaven Simonides, Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears That the everlasting sun of all time sees All golden, molten from the forge of years.