One of the most unpleasant characteristics of Swinburne's muse is the idea conveyed therein of the sex feminine. Women are no better (and rather worse) than wild animals according to this poet's standard; or if not animals, passive creatures, to be "bitten" and "sucked" and "pressed" and "crushed" as though they were a peculiar species of grape for man's special eating. Their hair is "woven and unwoven" recklessly till one feels it must surely be plucked out by the roots; their "flanks" are supposed to "shine," their "eyelids" are "as sweet savour issuing;" and the following vaguely comic lines occur in "Anactoria":-- "Ah, ah, thy beauty! _like a beast it bites_, Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites. Ah, sweet, and sweet again, and _seven times sweet The paces and the pauses of thy feet_!" More preposterously insane nonsense than this it would be difficult to find on any printed page extant. It will be chiefly on account of his utterly false conception of life and the higher emotions of the human heart, that Swinburne will not leave the great name he might have left had he recognised the full dignity of his calling. He had the power, but not the will. I say he "had" advisedly, because he has it no longer. His last productions are positively puerile as compared with his first, and each new thing he writes shows the falling-off in his skill more and more perceptibly. His similes are heavy and confused; his strained efforts at impossible paradox almost ludicrous. This is the kind of thing he revels in:-- The formless form of a mouthless mouth, And the biteless bite of a tooth that has gone.