If, then, we must be very careful in applying terms of censure, like “diffuse,” we must be equally careful of praise. “The beauty of Swinburne’s verse is the sound,” people say, explaining, “he had little visual imagination.” I am inclined to think that the word “beauty” is hardly to be used in connection with Swinburne’s verse at all; but in any case the beauty or effect of sound is neither that of music nor that of poetry which can be set to music. There is no reason why verse intended to be sung should not present a sharp visual image or convey an important intellectual meaning, for it supplements the music by another means of affecting the feelings. What we get in Swinburne is an expression by sound, which could not possibly associate itself with music. For what he gives is not images and ideas and music, it is one thing with a curious mixture of suggestions of all three. Shall I come, if I swim? wide are the waves, you see; Shall I come, if I fly, my dear Love, to thee? This is Campion, and an example of the kind of music that is not to be found in Swinburne. It is an arrangement and choice of words which has a sound-value and at the same time a coherent comprehensible meaning, and the two things—the musical value and meaning—are two things, not one. But in Swinburne there is no _pure_ beauty—no pure beauty of sound, or of image, or of idea. Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the beloved’s bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on. I quote from Shelley, because Shelley is supposed to be the master of Swinburne; and because his song, like that of Campion, has what Swinburne has not—a beauty of music and a beauty of content; and because it is clearly and simply expressed, with only two adjectives. Now, in Swinburne the meaning and the sound are one thing. He is concerned with the meaning of the word in a peculiar way: he employs, or rather “works,” the word’s meaning. And this is connected with an interesting fact about his vocabulary: he uses the most general word, because his emotion is never particular, never in direct line of vision, never focused; it is emotion reinforced, not by intensification, but by expansion. There lived a singer in France of old By the tideless dolorous midland sea. In a land of sand and ruin and gold There shone one woman, and none but she. You see that Provence is the merest point of diffusion here. Swinburne defines the place by the most general word, which has for him its own value. “Gold,” “ruin,” “dolorous”: it is not merely the sound that he wants, but the vague associations of idea that the words give him. He has not his eye on a particular place, as Li ruscelletti che dei verdi colli Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno....