_From this highly elaborated and extended species of lyric the transition is easy to the Ode. In the Victorian age, the ode, in its full Pindaric sense, has not been very frequently used. We have specimens by Mr. Swinburne in which the Dorian laws are closely adhered to. But the ode, in a more or less irregular form, whether pæan or threnody, has been the instrument of several of our leading lyrists. The genius of Mr. Swinburne, even to a greater degree than that of Shelley, is essentially dithyrambic, and is never happier than when it spreads its wings as wide as those of the wild swan, and soars upon the very breast of tempest. In these flights Mr. Swinburne attains to a volume of sonorous melody such as no other poet, perhaps, of the world has reached, and we may say to him, as he has shouted to the Mater Triumphalis:--_ _"Darkness to daylight shall lift up thy pæan, Hill to hill thunder, vale cry back to vale, With wind-notes as of eagles Æschylean, And Sappho singing in the nightingale."_ _Nothing could mark more picturesquely the wide diversity permitted in Victorian lyric than to turn from the sonorous and tumultuous odes of Mr. Swinburne to those of Mr. Patmore, in which stateliness of contemplation and a peculiar austerity of tenderness find their expression in odes of iambic cadence, the melody of which depends, not in their headlong torrent of sound, but in the cunning variation of catalectic pause. A similar form has been adopted by Lord De Tabley for many of his gorgeous studies of antique myth, and by Tennyson for his "Death of the Duke of Wellington." It is an error to call these iambic odes "irregular," although they do not follow the classic rules with strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The enchanting "I have led her home," in "Maud," is an example of this kind of lyric at its highest point of perfection._