I have always thought that Mr. Swinburne’s handling of language as a musical instrument raises an interesting question in regard to the relation of the arts. Of them all, music alone claims an absolute and independent position. Its appeal does not rely upon association, and demands no definable intellectual foundation. It stands in this way, even in its most primitive forms, as an example to all other arts, serving to remind them of what there is in each of the essential artistic quality; to remind them yet again of the inevitable danger that must be encountered when the artist adds to his natural burden the task of interpreting the changing ideals of life. Of all the other arts literature, by reason of the intellectual material out of which it is moulded, stands at the farthest pole from music. Painting and sculpture have their own manifest laws and limitations, which may serve to remind their exponents of the peril which awaits their transgression, but literature, even in the supreme form of verse, must of necessity be exposed to dangers from which only the intuitive instinct of the artist can preserve it. Borrowing as by right from all the arts, and pressing into its service all that has been won in the region of form and colour to enforce its own message of the spirit, it is nevertheless inevitable that to music it must remain the heaviest debtor, for its chosen vehicle of rhythmic language approaches most nearly to the abstract instrument of the musician. And yet, I think, even in Mr. Swinburne’s highest triumphs in metrical expression, it is made manifest that the attempt directly to capture the kind of melody that in the last resort belongs to music alone, there lurks a peril that no artist, however gifted, can hope to escape. It is not in any spirit of depreciation of Mr. Swinburne’s unchallenged gift, a gift which, in its kind, has perhaps never been surpassed in literature, that I have set down these stray thoughts upon the possible limits of music in verse. What I have said is rather intended to record an experience of changing taste in myself in the interval that has elapsed since the time when his earlier poems first captured my imagination. It has grown clearer to me as the years have passed that, even in poetry, only that music is enduring where the melody is subtly interwoven with passionate truth, and that the highest triumph of mere music, in so far as its effects are applicable to literature, must be won by constant cultivation of the simplest means of expression.