'
The mere enumeration of Mr.
The mere enumeration of Mr.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v24 - Sta to Tal
My master made his daughter Glumdalclitch
ride behind him. She carried me on her lap, in a box tied about
her waist. The girl had lined it on all sides with the softest
cloth she could get, well quilted underneath; furnished it with
her baby's bed, provided me with linen and other necessaries,
and made everything as convenient as she could. We had no
## p. 14279 (#473) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14279
other company but a boy of the house, who rode after us with
the luggage.
My master's design was to show me in all the towns by the
way; and to step out of the road, for fifty or a hundred miles,
to any village or person of quality's house where he might
expect custom. We made easy journeys, of not above seven or
eight score miles a day; for Glumdalclitch, on purpose to spare
me, complained she was tired with the trotting of the horse.
She often took me out of my box, at my own desire, to give
me air and show me the country; but always held me fast by a
leading-string. We passed over five or six rivers, many degrees
broader and deeper than the Nile or the Ganges; and there was
hardly a rivulet so small as the Thames at London Bridge. We
were ten weeks in our journey, and I was shown in eighteen
large towns, besides many villages and private families.
On the 26th day of October we arrived at the metropolis,
called in their language Lorbrulgrud, or Pride of the Universe.
My master took a lodging in the principal street of the city, not
far from the royal palace, and put out bills in the usual form,
containing an exact description of my person and parts. He
hired a large room between three and four hundred feet wide.
He provided a table sixty feet in diameter, upon which I was to
act my part; and palisadoed it round three feet from the edge,
and as many high, to prevent my falling over. I was shown
ten times a day, to the wonder and satisfaction of all people. I
could now speak the language tolerably well, and perfectly un-
derstood every word that was spoken to me. Besides I had
learnt their alphabet, and could make a shift to explain a sen-
tence here and there; for Glumdalclitch had been my instructor
while we were at home, and at leisure hours during our journey.
She carried a little book in her pocket not much larger than a
Sanson's Atlas; it was a common treatise for the use of young
girls, giving a short account of their religion: out of this she
taught me my letters, and interpreted the words.
## p. 14280 (#474) ##########################################
14280
JONATHAN SWIFT
THE HOUYHNHNMS
From (Gulliver's Travels)
[The author having been set ashore by a mutinous crew in an unknown
land, falls in with a nondescript animal called the Yahoo, is at length taken
possession of by the Houyhnhnms (horses) and conducted to their home.
The horses mistake him for another sort of Yahoo, and attempt to civilize
him. )
M
ren,
Y PRINCIPAL endeavor was to learn the language: which my
master (for so I shall henceforth call him) and his child-
and every servant of his house, were desirous to
teach me; for they looked upon it as a prodigy that a brute
animal should discover such marks of a rational creature. I
pointed to everything and inquired the name of it, which I wrote
down in my journal-book when I was alone; and corrected my
bad accent by desiring those of the family to pronounce it often.
In this employment a sorrel nag, one of the under-servants, was
very ready to assist me.
In speaking they pronounce through the nose and throat; and
their language approaches nearest to the High Dutch or German
of any I know in Europe, but is much more graceful and signifi-
cant. The Emperor Charles V. made almost the same observa-
tion when he said that “If he were to speak to his horse, it
should be in High Dutch. ”
The curiosity and impatience of my master were so great,
that he spent many hours of his leisure to instruct me.
He was
convinced (as he afterwards told me) that I must be a Yahoo :
but my teachableness, civility, and cleanliness astonished him;
which were qualities altogether opposite to those animals. He
was most perplexed about my clothes: reasoning sometimes with
himself whether they were a part of my body; for I never pulled
them off till the family were asleep, and got them on before
they waked in the morning. My master was eager to learn
“whence I came; how I acquired those appearances of reason
which I discovered in all my actions, and to know my story from
my own mouth; which he hoped he should soon do, by the great
proficiency I made in learning and pronouncing their words and
sentences. ” To help my memory, I formed all I learned into
the English alphabet, and writ the words down, with the transla-
tions. This last after some time I ventured to do in my master's
## p. 14281 (#475) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14281
presence. It cost me much trouble to explain to him what I was
doing, for the inhabitants have not the least idea of books or
literature.
In about ten weeks' time I was able to understand most of
his questions, and in three months could give him some tolerable
answers. He was extremely curious to know “from what part of
the country I came, and how I was taught to imitate a rational
creature; because the Yahoos (whom he saw I exactly resembled
in my head, hands, and face, that were only visible), with some
appearance of cunning, and the strongest disposition to mischief,
were observed to be the most unteachable of all brutes. " I
answered that “I came over the sea from a far place, with
many others of my own kind, in a great hollow vessel, made of
the bodies of trees; that my companions forced me to land on
this coast, and then left me to shift for myself. ” It was with
some difficulty, and by the help of many signs, that I brought
him to understand me. He replied that “I must needs be mis-
taken, or that I said the thing which was not: ” for they have no
word in their language to express lying or falsehood. He knew
it was impossible that there could be a country beyond the sea,
or that a parcel of brutes could move a wooden vessel whither
they pleased upon water.
He was
no Houyhnhnm alive
could make such a vessel, nor would trust Yahoos to manage it.
The word Houyhnhnm, in their tongue, signifies “a horse”;
and in its etymology, “the perfection of nature. ” I told my mas-
ter that "I was at a loss for expression, but would improve as
fast as I could, and hoped in a short time I should be able to
tell him wonders. ” He was pleased to direct his own mare, his
colt and foal, and the servants of the family, to take all opportu-
nities of instructing me; and every day, for two or three hours,
he was at the same pains himself. Several horses and mares of
quality in the neighborhood came often to our house, upon the
report spread of "a wonderful Yahoo, that could speak like a
Houyhnhnm, and seemed, in his words and actions, to discover
some glimmerings of reason. ” These delighted to converse with
me; they put many questions, and received such answers as I
was able to return. By all these advantages I made so great a
progress, that in five months from my arrival I understood what-
ever was spoken, and could express myself tolerably well.
The Houyhnhnms, who came to visit my master out of a de-
sign of seeing and talking with me, could hardly believe me to
sure
»
»
## p. 14282 (#476) ##########################################
14282
JONATHAN SWIFT
This I pres-
-
be a right Yahoo, because my body had a different covering from
others of my kind. They were astonished to observe me without
the usual hair or skin, except on my head, face, and hands; but I
discovered that secret to my master, upon an accident which hap-
pened about a fortnight before.
I have already told the reader that every night, when the
family were gone to bed, it was my custom to strip, and cover
myself with my clothes. It happened, one morning early, that
my master sent for me by the sorrel nag, who was his valet.
When he came I was fast asleep, my clothes fallen off on one
side, and my shirt above my waist. I awakened at the noise he
made, and observed him to deliver his message in some disorder;
after which he went to my master, and in a great fright gave
him a very confused account of what he had seen.
ently discovered; for, going as soon as I was dressed to pay my
attendance upon his Honor, he asked me the meaning of what
“
his servant had reported,- that I was not the same thing when I
slept as I appeared to be at other times; that his valet assured
him some part of me was white, some yellow,- at least not so
white, - and some brown. ”
I had hitherto concealed the secret of my dress, in order to
distinguish myself as much as possible from that cursed race of
Yahoos; but now I found it in vain to do so any longer. Besides,
I considered that my clothes and shoes would soon wear out,
which already were in a declining condition, and must be sup-
plied by some contrivance, -- from the hides of Yahoos, or other
brutes, - whereby the whole secret would be known. I there.
fore told my master that in the country whence I came, those
of my kind always covered their bodies with the hairs of cer-
tain animals prepared by art, as well for decency as to avoid the
inclemencies of air, both hot and cold: of which, as to my own
person, I would give him immediate conviction, if he pleased to
commend me; only desiring his excuse if I did not expose those
parts that nature taught us to conceal. ” He said, “My discourse
was all very strange, but especially the last part: for he could
not understand why nature should teach to conceal what
nature had given; that neither himself nor family were ashamed
of any part of their bodies: but however I might do as I pleased. ”
Whereupon I first unbuttoned my coat, and pulled it off; I did
the same with my waistcoat; I drew off my shoes, stockings, and
breeches; I let my shirt down to my waist, and drew up the
us
## p. 14283 (#477) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14283
bottom, fastening it like a girdle about my middle, to hide my
nakedness.
My master observed the whole performance with great signs
of curiosity and admiration. He took up all my clothes in his
pastern, one piece after another, and examined them diligently;
he then stroked my body very gently, and looked round me
several times: after which he said it was plain I must be a per-
fect Yahoo, but that I differed very much from the rest of my
species in the softness, whiteness, and smoothness of my skin;
my want of hair in several parts of my body; the shape and
shortness of my claws behind and before; and my affectation of
walking continually on my two hinder feet. He desired to see
no more, and gave me leave to put on my clothes again, for I
was shuddering with cold.
I expressed my uneasiness at his giving me so often the
appellation of Yahoo,— an odious animal, for which I had so
utter a hatred and contempt; I begged he would forbear apply-
ing that word to me, and make the same order in his family,
and among his friends whom he suffered to see me. I requested
likewise, that “the secret of my having a false covering to my
body might be known to none but himself, at least as long as
my present clothing should last; for as to what the sorrel nag,
his valet, had observed, his Honor might command him to con-
ceal it. "
All this my master very graciously consented to; and thus
the secret was kept till my clothes began to wear out, which I
was forced to supply by several contrivances that shall hereafter
be mentioned. In the mean time he desired “I would go on
with my utmost diligence to learn their language, because he was
more astonished at my capacity for speech and reason than at
the figure of my body, whether it were covered or not”; adding
that he waited with some impatience to hear the wonders
which I promised to tell him. ”
Thenceforward he doubled the pains he had been at to in-
struct me: he brought me into all company, and made them
treat me with civility; "because,” as he told them privately,
“this would put me into good humor, and make me
diverting. ”
Every day, when I waited on him, besides the trouble he was
at in teaching, he would ask me several questions concerning
myself, which I answered as well as I could; and by these means
(
more
## p. 14284 (#478) ##########################################
14284
JONATHAN SWIFT
he had already received some general ideas, though very imper-
fect. It would be tedious to relate the several steps by which I
advanced to a more regular conversation; but the first account
I gave of myself in any order and length was to this purpose: -
That "I came from a very far country, as I already had
attempted to tell him, with about fifty more of my own species;
that we traveled upon the seas in a great hollow vessel made of
wood, and larger than his Honor's house. " I described the ship
to him in the best terms I could, and explained by the help of
my handkerchief displayed, how it was driven forward by the
wind. “That upon a quarrel among us, I was set on shore on
this coast, where I walked forward, without knowing whither, till
he delivered me from the persecution of those execrable Yahoos. ”
He asked me, "Who made the ship, and how it was possible that
the Houyhnhnms of my country would leave it to the manage-
ment of brutes ? My answer was, that “I durst proceed no
further in my relation unless he would give me his word and
honor that he would not be offended, and then I would tell him
the wonders I had so often promised. ” He agreed; and I went
on by assuring him that the ship was made by creatures like
myself, who in all the countries I had traveled, as well as in my
own, were the only governing rational animals: and that upon
my arrival hither, I was as much astonished to see the Houyhn-
hnms act like rational beings as he or his friends could be in
finding some marks of reason in a creature he was pleased to
call a Yahoo; to which I owned my resemblance in every part,
but could not account for their degenerate and brutal nature.
I said further that “If good fortune ever restored me to my
native country, to relate my travels hither, as I resolved to do,
everybody would believe that I said the thing that was not-
that I invented the story out of my own head; and (with all pos-
sible respect to himself, his family, and friends, and under his
promise of not being offended), our countrymen would hardly
think it probable that a Houyhnhnm should be the presiding
creature of a nation, and a Yahoo the brute. ”
My master heard me with great appearances of uneasiness in
his countenance; because doubting, or not believing, are so little
known in this country, that the inhabitants cannot tell how to
behave themselves under such circumstances. And I remember,
in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of
manhood in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of
C
## p. 14285 (#479) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14285
»
lying and false representation, it was with much difficulty that
he comprehended what I meant, although he had otherwise a
most acute judgment; for he argued thus: “That the use of
speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive
information of facts; now, if any one said the thing which was
not, these ends were defeated, because I cannot properly be said
to understand him: and I am so far from receiving information
that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am led to
believe a thing black when it is white, and short when it is long. ”
And these were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of
lying, so perfectly well understood and so universally practiced
among human creatures.
To return from this digression. When I asserted that the
Yahoos were the only governing animals in my country, which
my master said was altogether past his conception, he desired to
know whether we “had Houyhnhnms among us, and what was
their employment ? » I told him, “We had great numbers; that
in summer they grazed in the fields, and in winter were kept in
houses with hay and oats, where Yahoo servants were employed
to rub their skins smooth, comb their manes, pick their feet, serve
them with food, and make their beds. ” “I understand you well,”
said my master: "it is now very plain, from all you have spoken,
that whatever share of reason the Yahoos pretend to, the Houyhn-
hnms are your masters. I heartily wish our Yahoos would be
so tractable. ” I begged his Honor “would please to excuse me
from proceeding any further, because I was very certain that the
account he expected from me would be highly displeasing. ” But
he insisted in commanding me to let him know the best and
the worst. I told him he should be obeyed. ” I owned that
“the Houyhnhnms among us, whom we called horses, were the
most generous and comely animal we had: that they excelled
in strength and swiftness, and when they belonged to persons of
quality, were employed in traveling, racing, or drawing chariots;
they were treated with much kindness and care, till they fell
into diseases, or became foundered in the feet: but then they
were sold, and used to all kinds of drudgery till they died: after
which their skins were stripped, and sold for what they were
worth, and their bodies left to be devoured by dogs and birds of
prey. But the common race of horses had not so good fortune;
being kept by farmers and carriers, and other mean people, who
put them to greater labor and fed them worse. ” I described as
## p. 14286 (#480) ##########################################
14286
JONATHAN SWIFT
well as I could our way of riding; the shape and use of a bridle,
a saddle, a spur, and a whip; of harness and wheels. I added
that we fastened plates of a certain hard substance called iron
at the bottom of their feet, to preserve their hoofs from being
broken by the stony ways on which we often traveled.
My master, after some expressions of great indignation, won-
dered “how we dared to venture upon a Houyhnhnm's back; for
he was sure that the weakest servant in his house would be able
to shake off the strongest Yahoo, or by lying down and rolling
on his back, squeeze the brute to death. ” I answered that «Our
horses were trained up, from three or four years old, to the
several uses we intended them for: that if any of them proved
intolerably vicious, they were employed for carriages; that they
were severely beaten, while they were young, for any mischievous
tricks; that the males designed for the common use of riding
or draught were generally castrated about two years after their
birth, to take down their spirits, and make them more tame and
gentle: that they were indeed sensible of rewards and punish-
ments; but his Honor would please to consider that they had
not the least tincture of reason, any more than the Yahoos in
this country. ”
It put me to the pains of many circumlocutions to give my
master a right idea of what I spoke; for their language does not
abound in variety of words, because their wants and passions are
fewer than among us. But it is impossible to express his noble
resentment at our savage tre ment of the Houyhnhnm race;
particularly after I had explained the manner and use of cas-
trating horses among us to hinder them from propagating their
kind, and to render them more servile. He said, “If it were
possible there could be any country where Yahoos alone were
endued with reason, they certainly must be the governing animal;
because reason in time will always prevail against brutal strength.
But considering the frame of our bodies, and especially of mine,
he thought no creature of equal bulk was so ill contrived for
employing that reason in the common offices of life;” whereupon
he desired to know whether “those among whom I lived resem.
bled me or the Yahoos of his country. ” I assured him that “I
was as well shaped as most of my age; but the younger, and the
females, were much more soft and tender, and the skins of the
latter generally as white as milk. ” He said, “I differed indeed
from other Yahoos, being much more cleanly and not altogether
## p. 14287 (#481) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14287
(
-
so deformed; but in point of real advantage, he thought I differed
for the worse. That my nails were of no use either to my fore
or hinder feet: as to my fore-feet, he could not properly call
them by that name, for he never observed me to walk upon
them, – that they were too soft to bear the ground; that I gener-
ally went with them uncovered; neither was the covering I some-
times wore on them of the same shape or so strong as that on
my feet behind. That I could not walk with any security, for
if either of my hinder feet slipped, I must inevitably fall. ” He
then began to find fault with other parts of my body:— «The
fatness of my face, the prominence of my nose, mine eyes
placed directly in front, so that I could not look on either side
without turning my head; that I was not able to feed myself
without lifting one of my fore-feet to my mouth, and therefore
nature had placed those joints to answer that necessity. He
knew not what could be the use of those several clefts and divis-
ions in my feet behind, - that these were too soft to bear the
hardness and sharpness of stones, without a covering made from
the skin of some other brute; that my whole body wanted a
fence against heat and cold, which I was forced to put on and
off every day with tediousness and trouble. And lastly, that
he observed every animal in this country naturally to abhor the
Yahoos; whom the weaker avoided, and the stronger drove from
them. So that, supposing us to have the gift of reason, he
could not see how it were possible to cure that natural antipathy
which every creature discovered against us; nor, consequently,
,
how we could tame and render them serviceable. However, he
would, as he said, “debate the matter no further; because he
was more desirous to know my story, the country where I was
born, and the several actions and events of my life before I came
hither. »
-
THE STRULDBRUGS
From (Gulliver's Travels)
0
NE day, in much good company [among the Luggnaggians)
I was asked by a person of quality, “whether I had seen
any of their struldbrugs, or immortals ? » I said, "I had
not;” and desired he would explain to me what he meant by
such an appellation, applied to a mortal creature. He told me
## p. 14288 (#482) ##########################################
14288
JONATHAN SWIFT
(
(c
that "sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born
in a family, with a red circular spot on the forehead, directly
over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it
should never die. The spot," as he described it, was about the
compass of a silver threepence, but in the course of time grew
larger, and changed its color: for at twelve years of age it be-
came green, so continued till five-and-twenty, then turned a deep
blue; at five-and-forty it grew coal-black, and as large as an
English shilling, but never admitted any further alteration. ”
After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the
struldbrugs among them. He said, “They commonly acted like
mortals till about thirty years old; after which by degrees they
grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came
to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession; for
otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species
born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation
by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the
extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the .
follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which
arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not
only opinionated, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but
incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which
never descended below their grandchildren, Envy and impotent
desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against
which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the
younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the
former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleas-
ure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine
that others are gone to a harbor of rest to which they themselves
never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of any.
thing but what they learned and observed in their youth and
middle age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or
particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition
than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among
them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose
their memories: these meet with more pity and assistance be-
cause they want many bad qualities which abound in others. ”
## p. 14289 (#483) ##########################################
14289
S
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
(1837-)
BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE
ARLY in the eighties, there were living in England six great
poets, whose work had given to the later Victorian era of
English song a splendor almost comparable to that of the
Elizabethan and later Georgian periods. All of these poets but one
have now passed away (Rossetti in 1882, Arnold in 1888, Browning in
1889, Tennyson in 1892, and Morris in 1896), leaving Mr. Swinburne in
solitary pre-eminence. In this year of the
Queen's Jubilee he is left with no possible
rival among the living; and stands as the
Victorian poet par excellence in a peculiarly
literal sense, for he was born in the year
of her Majesty's accession to the throne,
which makes his sixty years conterminous
with the sixty years of her reign. So little
has been made public concerning that life,
that his personality has remained even
more closely veiled than was that of Tenny-
son; and the facts at the command of the
biographer are of the most meagre descrip-
tion. He was the son of a distinguished ALGERNON SWINBURNE
officer of the Royal Navy; and on his moth-
er's side, descended from the third Earl of Ashburnham. He. was
educated at Balliol College, Oxford, but left in 1860 without taking
a degree. A journey to Italy followed; made chiefly for the purpose
of paying a tribute of affectionate admiration to the old poet Lan-
dor, then nearing the close of his days in Florence.
The greater
part of Mr. Swinburne's life has been spent in England: for a time he
lived in London with the Rossetti brothers and Mr. George Meredith;
but for many years past his home has been at Wimbledon, where
he has kept house with Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, the distinguished
critic and the closest of his friends.
Mr. Swinburne made his first appearance in literature as a dra-
matic poet; and published in rapid succession the four dramas
Rosamond' (1860), «The Queen Mother' (1860), Atalanta in Caly-
don' (1865), and Chastelard (1865). The first of these works has for
XIV–894
## p. 14290 (#484) ##########################################
14290
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
>
its subject the idyl and tragedy of Henry II. at Woodstock, the sec-
ond the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the last an episode in the
early life of Mary Stuart at the French court. Atalanta in Calydon
is a noble tragedy upon a Greek theme, and written in as close a
reproduction of the Greek manner as it is likely to be given to any
modern poet to achieve. These four works gained for their author a
considerable reputation with cultivated readers, yet made no direct
appeal to the wider public. But the situation became changed in the
year that followed the appearance of Chastelard,'— the year of the
famous Poems and Ballads) (1866). It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that no other volume of English poetry published before or
since, ever created so great a sensation as this. If Byron awoke to
find himself famous the day after the first cantos of Childe Harold'
made their appearance, Mr. Swinburne awoke to find himself both
famous and notorious. For the Poems and Ballads) not only showed
that a new poet had arisen with a voice of his own, and possessed
of an absolutely unexampled command of the resources of English
rhythm, but they also showed that the author deemed fit for poetical
treatment certain passional aspects of human life concerning which
the best English tradition had hitherto been one of reticence. The
unerring instinct of sensational journalism at once sought out for
discussion these poems (perhaps a dozen in number) of question-
able propriety; and before the year was over, the volume had become
the subject of a discussion so ample and so heated that a parallel is
hardly to be found in the history of English literature.
This discussion has proved peculiarly unfortunate for the poet's
fame; since there has grown out of it a legend which still persists
in the popular consciousness, and which embodies a view of the poet
so distorted and so grotesquely untrue, that those who are acquainted
with his work as a whole can only smile helplessly and wait for time
to set matters right. The facts of the matter are simply these: The
Poems and Ballads ) was essentially a first book. Its contents had
been written for the most part by a mere boy, long before their col-
lection into a volume; and bear about the same relation to his mature
work as is borne by the vaporings of Shelley's Queen Mab' to Pro-
metheus Unbound' and Epipsychidion. The objectionable pieces
are few in number, and probably no one regrets more than the author
himself the defective taste which permitted them to be preserved.
«They are obviously,” to quote from a recent critic, “the hasty and
violent defiance hurled in the face of British Philistinism by a youth-
ful writer, who, in addition to the exuberance of his scorn of conven-
tions, was also, it is plain, influenced by a very boyish desire to shock
the dull respectabilities of the average Philistine. ” But the unfair
critical onslaught upon these poems (utterly ignoring the many pure
and elevated numbers found in the same volume) was so noisy that
(
## p. 14291 (#485) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14291
its echo has been prolonged; and the opinion still obtains in many
quarters that sensuality is the chief attribute of a poet who in reality
might be charged with the fault of excessive spirituality, so far above
earth and so tenuous is the atmosphere in which he has his intellect-
ual being. If we accept Milton's dictum that poetry should be sim-
ple, sensuous, and passionate, it may be admitted that Mr. Swinburne
has passion (although mainly of the intellectual sort), but he is rarely
simple; while in sensuous charm he is distinctly inferior to more than
one of his contemporaries.
The even-minded critic of Mr. Swinburne's poetry thirty years
ago (and there were such, notable among them being Richard Grant
White and Mr. Stedman) might discern from an examination of the
five works already mentioned, the leading traits that so many other
volumes were to develop. There were already then evident the aston-
ishing virtuosity in the use of English metres; the linguistic faculty,
by virtue of which the poet composed Greek, Latin, and French
verses with as much apparent readiness as English; the imitative
power which made it possible for him to write like Chaucer, or the
poets of the old ballad and the miracle play; the spiritual insight
which made Atalanta) so much more than a mere imitation of Greek
tragedy; the hero-worship which is so generous a trait of his charac-
ter; the defense of religion against theology and priestcraft; and the
intense love of liberty that breathes through all his work.
Since the year which made Mr. Swinburne's name familiar to all
lovers of English poetry, his activity has been unceasing. Produc-
tions in prose and verse have flowed from his pen at the rate of
about a volume annually; the complete list of his works embracing
upwards of thirty volumes, about one third of which are studies in
literary criticism. Although these latter volumes form an important
section of his writings, they must be dismissed with a few words.
There are three collections of miscellaneous critical essays; separate
monographs of considerable bulk upon Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Victor
Hugo, and William Blake, briefer monographs upon George Chapman
and Charlotte Bronté; a highly controversial examination of certain
literary reputations, Under the Microscope'; and several pamphlets
or less polemical in character. 'A Year's Letters,' which is
a sort of prose novelette, was written for periodical publication under
the pseudonym “Mrs. Horace Manners”; but has never been reprinted.
There are also many critical studies to be found in the pages of the
English monthly reviews; notable among them being a nearly com-
plete series of papers which examine in close detail the work of
the Elizabethan dramatists, and constitute, together with the published
volumes on Shakespeare, Jonson, and Chapman, the most exhaustive
and scholarly commentary that has yet been produced upon that
important body of English poetry. The style of these prose writings
more
## p. 14292 (#486) ##########################################
14292
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
is sui generis, and as astonishing in its way as that of Carlyle. It
defies imitation; which is probably fortunate, since it is not an alto-
gether admirable style. But with all its vehemence, its verbosity,
and its recondite allusiveness, it has somehow the power to carry the
reader with it; sweeping away his critical sense for the time being,
and compelling him to share in both the occasional prejudices and
the frequent enthusiasms of the writer. And after due allowance has
been made for the temperamental qualities of Mr. Swinburne, and
for the extravagances of his diction, there will be found to remain a
residuum of the highest critical value; so that it may fairly be said
that he has illuminated every subject that he has chosen to discuss.
In dealing with the volumes of poetry — about a score in num-
ber- of which nothing has yet been said, we are confronted with
an embarras de richesses. Chronologically, the earliest of them is the
(Songs Before Sunrise) (1871), and the latest (The Tale of Balen?
(1896). Perhaps the first thing that should be said about them, in
view of still current misconceptions, is that whatever taint of sensu-
ality clung to the productions of the poet's youth, the work of his
manhood is singularly free from any offense of this sort. In its dra-
matic portions, it handles the noblest of themes with superb creative
power, and deals with them in grave harmonious measures; in its
lyrical portions, it clothes an almost austere ideal of conduct in
melodies whose beauty is everlasting. The dramatic poems include
( Erechtheus,' a Greek tragedy fully as fine as 'Atalanta,' and exhibit-
ing more of artistic restraint; the two works (Bothwell and Mary
Stuart,' which complete the magnificent trilogy begun by “Chaste-
lard’; Marino Faliero,' a Venetian subject treated with splendid
effect; Locrine,' a tragedy suggested by Milton's Comus,' and upon
a theme dealt with by an unknown Elizabethan dramatist; and “The
Sisters,' a comparatively unimportant domestic tragedy. Strongly
dramatic in spirit, although in form a narrative in rhymed couplets,
the tale of (Tristram of Lyonesse' completes the list of Mr. Swin-
burne's longer poetical works down to “The Tale of Balen,' which is
essentially a verse paraphrase of a section of the Morte d'Arthur' of
Malory. The lyrical division of Mr. Swinburne's work includes two
additional series of 'Poems and Ballads'; the impassioned volume of
'Songs Before Sunrise,' inspired by the Italian revolutionary move-
ment, and dedicated to Mazzini, —a work which is probably the high-
est and most sustained expression of the poet's lyrical powers; the
(Songs of Two Nations, which includes the great (Song of Italy,'
the superb Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic,' and
the fierce sonnets called Diræ'; the Songs of the Springtides,'
whereof “Thalassius' -- a sort of spiritual autobiography, in which
the poet pays the noblest of his many tributes to the memory of
Landor — is the first and the greatest; the (Studies in Song,' which
## p. 14293 (#487) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14293
(
>
.
includes the wonderful lyrical group inspired By the North Sea';
the "Tristram' volume, which contains, besides the titular poem,
many other pieces, - among them A Dark Month, the group of
songs which has made their author the supreme English poet of
childhood; A Century of Roundels'; A Midsummer Holiday';
('
and Astrophel. ' Mention should also be made, as illustrating the
lighter aspect of Mr. Swinburne's genius, of the anonymously pub-
lished Heptalogia; or The Seven against Sense,' a collection of the
cleverest parodies ever written, in which the poet travesties his own
style with no less glee than the style of half a dozen of his contem-
poraries. If one would seek for further indications of his sense of
humor, they may be found in the poem Disgust,' which parodies
Tennyson's Despair,' and in the Report of the Proceedings on the
First Anniversary Session of the Newest Shakespeare Society.
'
The mere enumeration of Mr. Swinburne's works requires so
much space that little remains for any general comment upon them.
It should be said that he early outgrew the doctrine of art for
art's sake," and has made his verse more and more the ally of great
and worthy causes. Such ardent and whole-souled admiration of man
for man as finds expression in his many poems to Landor, Hugo,
and Mazzini, to say nothing of his many tributes to lesser men, is
hardly paralleled in literature. And the sweep of his lyre becomes
more impressive when its strings are plucked in behalf of
France crushed beneath the heel of the usurper; of Italy struggling
to be free. The fierce indignation with which he inveighs against
all the social, political, and religious forces that array themselves
against the freedom of the body and soul of man, the glowing patri-
otism which fires his song when its theme is the proud heritage of
achievement to which every Englishman is born, and the prophetic
inspiration which imparts to him the vision of a regenerated human-
ity, and all the wonder that shall be when “the world's great age
begins anew” and “the golden years return,” – these are indeed sub-
jects for the noblest sort of poetical expression; and they are the
very warp and woof of the many-colored verbal fabric that has come
from Mr. Swinburne's loom. And with these great words spoken for
mankind in the abstract there comes also a personal message, exalt-
ing the virtues of heroism, and sacrifice of self, and steadfast devotion
to high impersonal ends,- a message that finds its highest embodi. .
ment in such poems as “Super Flumina Babylonis,' and (The Pil-
grims,' and 'Thalassius'; a message that enforces as fine an ethical
ideal of individual conduct as may be found anywhere in English lit-
erature.
even
Drapeysers
## p. 14294 (#488) ##########################################
14294
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
DEDICATION
1865
THE
He sea gives her shells to the shingle,
The earth gives her streams to the sea;
They are many, but my gift is single,
My verses, the first fruits of me.
Let the wind take the green and the gray leaf,
Cast forth without fruit upon air;
Take rose-leaf and vine-leaf and bay-leaf
Blown loose from the hair.
The night shakes them round me in legions,
Dawn drives them before her like dreams;
Time sheds them like snows on strange regions,
Swept shoreward on infinite streams;
Leaves pallid and sombre and ruddy
Dead fruits of the fugitive years;
Some stained as with wine and made bloody,
And some as with tears.
Some scattered in seven years' traces,
As they fell from the boy that was then;
Long left among idle green places,
Or gathered but now among men;
On seas full of wonder and peril,
Blown white round the capes of the north;
Or in islands where myrtles are sterile
And loves bring not forth.
O daughters of dreams and of stories
That life is not wearied of yet, -
Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
Felise and Yolande and Juliette, -
Shall I find you not still, shall I miss you,
When sleep that is true or that seems
Comes back to me hopeless to kiss you,
O daughters of dreams?
They are past as a slumber that passes,
As the dew of a dawn of old time;
More frail than the shadows on glasses,
More fleet than a wave or a rhyine.
As the waves after ebb drawing seaward,
When their hollows are full of the night,
## p. 14295 (#489) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14295
So the birds that flew singing to me-ward
Recede out of sight.
The songs of dead seasons that wander
On wings of articulate words;
Lost leaves that the shore-wind may squander,
Light flocks of untamable birds:
Some sang to me dreaming in class-time,
And truant in hand as in tongue;
For the youngest were born of boy's pastime,
The eldest are young.
Is there shelter while life in them lingers,
Is there hearing for songs that recede,
Tunes touched from a harp with men's fingers
Or blown with boy's mouth in a reed?
Is there place in the land of your labor,
Is there room in your world of delight,
Where change has not sorrow for neighbor
And day has not night?
In their wings though the sea-wind yet quivers,
Will you spare not a space for them there,
Made green with the running of rivers
And gracious with temperate air;
In the fields and turreted cities,
That cover from sunshine and rain
Fair passions and bountiful pities
And loves without strain ?
In a land of clear colors and stories,
In a region of shadowless hours,
Where earth has a garment of glories
And a murmur of musical flowers;
In woods where the spring half uncovers
The flush of her amorous face,
By the waters that listen for lovers, -
For these is there place?
For the song-birds of sorrow, that muffle
Their music as clouds do their fire;
For the storm-birds of passion, that ruffle
Wild wings in a wind of desire;
In the stream of the storm as it setties
Blown seaward, borne far from the sun,
Shaken loose on the darkness like petals
Dropt one after one ?
## p. 14296 (#490) ##########################################
14296
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Though the world of your hands be more gracious,
And lovelier in lordship of things
Clothed round by sweet art with the spacious
Warm heaven of her imminent wings,
Let them enter, unfledged and nigh fainting,
For the love of old loves and lost times;
And receive in your palace of painting
This revel of rhymes.
Though the seasons of man full of losses
Make empty the years full of youth,
If but one thing be constant in crosses,
Change lays not her hand upon truth;
Hopes die, and their tombs are for token
That the grief, as the joy, of them ends
Ere time that breaks all men has broken
The faith between friends.
Though the many lights dwindle to one light,
There is help if the heaven has one;
Though the skies be discrowned of the sunlight
And the earth dispossessed of the sun,
They have moonlight and sleep for repayment,
When, refreshed as a bride, and set free
With stars and sea-winds in her raiment,
Night sinks on the sea.
HYMN TO PROSERPINE
AFTER THE PROCLAMATION IN ROME OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
Vicisti, Galilæe
I
HAVE lived long enough, having seen one thing,— that love hath an
end:
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh
or that weep:
For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;
But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.
Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harp-string of gold,
A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold ?
I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain
To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain.
## p. 14297 (#491) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14297
For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,
We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death.
O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!
From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains,
men say
New Gods are crowned in the city, their fowers have broken your
rods:
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were.
Time and the Gods are at strife: ye dwell in the midst thereof,
Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.
I say to you, Cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, Be at peace,
Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean ? but these thou shalt not take:
The laurel, the palms, and the pæan, the breast of the nymphs in the
brake,-
Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that Aicker like fire.
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things?
Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.
A little while and we die: shall life not thrive as it may ?
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labor, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years ?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray
from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
Sleep, shall we sleep after all ? for the world is not sweet in the end;
For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.
Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;
But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of
the tides.
O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods !
O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!
Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not, neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.
All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast
Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the
past:
## p. 14298 (#492) ##########################################
14298
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
as
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-
gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits;
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas
with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled.
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the
world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north wind bound; and its salt is of all men's
tears:
With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years;
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour:
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that
devour;
And its vapor and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to
be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of
the sea;
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the
air :
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is
made bare.
Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea
with rods?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye
Gods?
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at
last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of
things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you
for kings.
Though the feet of thine high-priests tread where thy lords and our
forefathers trod,
Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a
God,
Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her
head,
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee
dead.
## p. 14299 (#493) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14299
Of the maiden thy mother, men sing as a goddess with grace clad
around:
Thou art throned where another was king: where another was queen
she is crowned.
Yea, once we had sight of another; but now she is queen, say these.
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering
seas,
Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the
foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,
Her deep hair heavily laden with odor and color of flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendor, a flame,
Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her
name.
For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she
Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on
the sea,
And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.
Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token ? we wist that ye should not
fall.
Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all.
But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end :
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also, I also, thy brother: I go as I came unto earth.
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night
where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from
the heart,
Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red
rose is white,
And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of
the night,
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star,
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and
undone.
Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal
breath:
For these give labor and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
## p. 14300 (#494) ##########################################
14300
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.
THE GARDEN OF PROSERPINE
H*
ERE, where the world is quiet;
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
Here life has death for neighbor,
And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labor,
Weak ships and spirits steer:
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
And no such things grow here.
No growth of moor or coppice,
No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies,
Green grapes of Proserpine;
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes,
Save this whereout she crushes
For dead men deadly wine.
## p. 14301 (#495) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14301
Pale, without name or number,
In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
Comes out of darkness morn.
Though one were strong as seven,
He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
In the end it is not well.
Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love's who fears to greet her,
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands.
She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her, and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.
There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things:
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.
## p. 14302 (#496) ##########################################
14302
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure;
To-day will die to-morrow;
Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor winter leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
HESPERIA
0
UT of the golden remote wild west where the sea without shore
is,
Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fullness of joy,
As a wind sets in with the autumn that blows from the region of
stories,
Blows with a perfume of songs and of memories beloved from a boy,
Blows from the capes of the past oversea to the bays of the present,
Filled as with shadow of sound with the pulse of invisible feet,
Far out to the shallows and straits of the future, by rough ways or
pleasant -
Is it thither the wind's wings beat ? is it hither to me, O my
sweet ?
## p. 14303 (#497) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14303
as
a
For thee, in the stream of the deep tide-wind blowing in with the
water,
Thee I behold as a bird borne in with the wind from the west,
Straight from the sunset, across white waves whence rose
daughter
Venus thy mother, in years when the world was a water at rest.
Out of the distance of dreams, as a dream that abides after slumber,
Strayed from the fugitive flock of the night, when the moon overhead
Wanes in the wan waste heights of the heaven, and stars without
number
Die without sound, and are spent like lamps that are burnt by the
dead, -
Comes back to me, stays by me, lulls me with touch of forgotten
caresses,
One warm dream clad about with a fire as of life that endures :
The delight of thy face, and the sound of thy feet, and the wind of
thy tresses,
And all of a man that regrets, and all of a maid that allures.
But thy bosom is warm for my face, and profound as a manifold
flower,
Thy silence as music, thy voice as an odor that fades in a flame;
Not a dream, not a dream is the kiss of thy mouth, and the bounti-
ful hour
That makes me forget what was sin, and would make me forget were
it shame.
Thine eyes that are quiet, thine hands that are tender, thy lips that
are loving,
Comfort and cool me as dew in the dawn of a moon like a dream;
And my heart yearns baffled and blind, moved vainly toward thee,
and moving
As the refluent seaweed moves in the languid exuberant stream,
Fair as a rose is on earth, as a rose under water in prison,
That stretches and swings to the slow passionate pulse of the sea,
Closed up from the air and the sun, but alive, as a ghost re-arisen,
Pale as the love that revives as a ghost re-arisen in me.
From the bountiful infinite west, from the happy memorial places
Full of the stately repose and the lordly delight of the dead,
Where the fortunate islands are lit with the light of ineffable faces,
And the sound of a sea without wind is about them, and sunset is
red,
Come back to redeem and release me from love that recalls and re-
presses,
That cleaves to my flesh as a flame, till the serpent has eaten his fill;
## p. 14304 (#498) ##########################################
14304
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
From the bitter delights of the dark, and the feverish, the furtive
caresses
That murder the youth in a man or ever his heart have its will.
Thy lips cannot laugh and thine eyes cannot weep; thou art pale as
a rose is,
Paler and sweeter than leaves that cover the blush of the bud:
And the heart of the flower is compassion, and pity the core it
incloses,
Pity, not love, that is born of the breath and decays with the blood.
As the cross that a wild nun clasps till the edge of it bruises her
bosom,
So love wounds as we grasp it, and blackens and burns as a flame;
I have loved overmuch in my life: when the live bud bursts with the
blossom,
Bitter as ashes or tears is the fruit, and the wine thereof shame.
As a heart that its anguish divides is the green bud cloven asunder;
As the blood of a man self-slain is the flush of the leaves that
allure;
And the perfume as poison and wine to the brain, a delight and a
wonder;
And the thorns are too sharp for a boy, too slight for a man, to
endure.
Too soon did I love it, and lost love's rose; and I cared not for
glory's:
Only the blossoms of sleep and of pleasure were mixed in my hair.
Was it myrtle or poppy thy garland was woven with, O my Dolores?
Was it pallor of slumber, or blush as of blood, that I found in thee
fair ?
For desire is a respite from love, and the flesh not the heart is her
fuel;
She was sweet to me once, who am fled and escaped from the rage
of her reign;
Who behold as of old time at hand as I turn, with her mouth grow-
ing cruel,
And flushed as with wine with the blood of her lovers, Our Lady of
Pain.
Low down where the thicket is thicker with thorns than with leaves
in the summer,
In the brake is a gleaming of eyes and a hissing of tongues that I
knew;
And the lithe long throats of her snakes reach round her, their
mouths overcome her,
And her lips grow cool with their foam, made moist as a desert
with dew.
## p. 14305 (#499) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14305
With the thirst and the hunger of lust though her beautiful lips be
so bitter,
(smile;
With the cold foul foam of the snakes, they soften and redden and
And her fierce mouth sweetens, her eyes wax wide, and her eyelashes
glitter,
And she laughs with a savor of blood in her face, and a savor of
guile.
She laughs, and her hands reach hither, her hair blows hither and
hisses,
As a low-lit flame in a wind, back-blown till it shudder and leap:
Let her lips not again lay hold on my soul, nor her poisonous kisses,
To consume it alive and divide from thy bosom, Our Lady of Sleep.
Ah, daughter of sunset and slumber, if now it return into prison,
Who shall redeem it anew? but we, if thou wilt, let us fly;
Let us take to us, now that the white skies thrill with a moon un-
arisen,
Swift horses of fear or of love, take flight and depart and not die.
They are swifter than dreams, they are stronger than death; there
is none that hath ridden,
None that shall ride in the dim strange ways of his life as we ride:
By the meadows of memory, the highlands of hope, and the shore
that is hidden,
Where life breaks loud and unseen, a sonorous invisible tide;
By the sands where sorrow has trodden, the salt pools bitter and
sterile,
By the thundering reef and the low sea-wall and the channel ºf
years,
Our wild steeds press on the night, strain hard through pleasure and
peril,
Labor and listen, and pant not or pause for the peril that nears;
And the sound of them trampling the way cleaves night as an arrow
asunder;
And slow by the sandhill and swift by the down with its glimpses of
grass,
Sudden and steady the music, as eight hoofs trample and thunder,
Rings in the ear of the low blind wind of the night as we pass;
Shrill shrieks in our faces the blind bland air that was mute as a
maiden,
Stung into storm by the speed of our passage, and deaf where we
past;
And our spirits too burn as we bound, thine holy but mine heavy-
laden,
As we burn with the fire of our flight: ah, love, shall we win at the
last ?
XXIV—895
## p. 14306 (#500) ##########################################
14306
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
IN MEMORY OF WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
B“CK
ACK to the flower-town, side by side,
The bright months bring,
New-born, the bridegroom and the bride,
Freedom and spring.
The sweet land laughs from sea to sea,
Filled full of sun;
All things come back to her, being free -
All things but one.
In many a tender wheaten plot,
Flowers that were dead
Live, and old suns revive; but not
That holier head.
By this white wandering waste of sea,
Far north, I hear
One face shall never turn to me
As once this year;
Shall never smile and turn and rest
On mine as there,
Nor one most sacred hand be prest
Upon my hair.
I came as one whose thoughts half linger,
Half run before;
The youngest to the oldest singer
That England bore.
I found him whom I shall not find
Till all grief end,
In holiest age our mightiest mind,
Father and friend.
But thou, if anything endure,
If hope there be,
O spirit that man's life left pure,
Man's death set free,-
Not with disdain of days that were,
Look earthward now:
Let dreams revive the reverend hair,
The imperial brow:
Come back in sleep; for in the life
Where thou art not
## p. 14307 (#501) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14307
We find none like thee. Time and strife
And the world's lot
Move thee no more; but love at least
And reverent heart
May move thee, royal and released
Soul, as thou art.
And thou, his Florence, to thy trust
Receive and keep-
Keep safe his dedicated dust,
His sacred sleep.
So shall thy lovers, come from far,
Mix with thy name
As morning-star with evening-star
His faultless fame.
A FORSAKEN GARDEN
I
N A coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn incloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed,
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand ?
So long have the gray bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briers if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.
The dense hard passage is blind and stifled,
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken -
These remain.
## p. 14308 (#502) ##########################################
14308
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song:
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long
The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath;
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.
Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,”
Did he whisper? -«look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam flowers endure when the rose blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die — but we ? »
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.
Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end; but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea, as a rose must wither, -
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them,
Or the wave.
All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea;
Not a breath of the time that has been, hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We shall sleep.
Here death may deal not again for ever;
Here change may come not till all change end.
## p. 14309 (#503) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14309
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left naught living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing, -
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be ;
Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea,
Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and•meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink.
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.
THE PILGRIMS
W"
was
ho is your lady of love, O ye that pass
Singing ? and is it for sorrow of that which
That ye sing sadly, or dream of what shall be ?
For gladly at once and sadly it seems ye sing. –
Our lady of love by you is unbeholden:
For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor lips, nor golden
Treasure of hair, nor face, nor form; but we
That love, we know her more fair than anything.
Is she a queen, having great gifts to give ? -
Yea, these; that whoso hath seen her shall not live
Except he serve her sorrowing, with strange pain,
Travail and bloodshedding and bitterer tears;
And when she bids die he shall surely die.
And he shall leave all things under the sky,
And go forth naked under sun and rain,
And work and wait and watch out all his years.
Hath she on earth no place of habitation ? -
Age to age calling, nation answering nation,
Cries out, Where is she? and there is none to say:
For if she be not in the spirit of men,
For if in the inward soul she hath no place,
In vain they cry unto her, seeking her face,
In vain their mouths make much of her; for they
Cry with vain tongues, till the heart lives again.
## p. 14310 (#504) ##########################################
14310
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
O ye that follow, and have ye no repentance ?
For on your brows is written mortal sentence,
An hieroglyph of sorrow, a fiery sign,
That in your lives ye shall not pause or rest,
Nor have the sure sweet common love, nor keep
Friends and safe days, nor joy of life nor sleep. -
These have we not, who have one thing, the divine
Face and clear eyes of faith and fruitful breast.
And ye shall die before your thrones be won. -
Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun
Shall move and shine without us, and we lie
Dead; but if she too move on earth and live,
But if the old world with all the old irons rent
Laugh and give thanks, shall we be not content ?
Nay, we shall rather live, we shall not die,
Life being so little and death so good to give.
And these men shall forget you. — Yea, but we
Shall be a part of the earth and the ancient sea,
And heaven's high air august, and awful fire,
And all things good; and no man's heart shall beat
But somewhat in it of our blood once shed
Shall quiver and quicken, as now in us the dead
Blood of men slain and the old same life's desire
Plants in their fiery footprints our fresh feet.
But ye that might be clothed with all things pleasant,
Ye are foolish that put off the fair soft present,
That clothe yourselves with the cold future air;
When mother and father and tender sister and brother
And the old live love that was shall be as ye,
Dust, and no fruit of loving life shall be. -
She shall be yet who is more than all these were,
Than sister or wife or father unto us, or mother.
Is this worth life, is this, to win for wages ?
Lo, the dead mouths of the awful gray-grown ages,
The venerable, in the past that is their prison,
In the outer darkness, in the unopening grave,
Laugh, knowing how many as ye now say have said,
How many, and all are fallen, are fallen and dead:
Shall ye dead rise, and these dead have not risen ? -
Not we but she, who is tender and swift to save.
## p. 14311 (#505) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14311
Are ye not weary and faint not by the way,
Seeing night by night devoured of day by day,
Seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire?
Sleepless; and ye too, when shall ye too sleep? -
We are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet,
And surely more than all things sleep were sweet,
Than all things save the inexorable desire
Which whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep.
Is this so sweet that one were fain to follow ?
Is this so sure where all men's hopes are hollow,
Even this your dream, that by much tribulation
Ye shall make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks
straight?
Nay, though our life were blind, our death were fruitless,
Not therefore were the whole world's high hope rootless;
But man to man, nation would turn to nation,
And the old life live, and the old great world be great.
Pass on then and pass by us and let us be,
For what light think ye after life to see?
And if the world fare better, will ye know?
And if man triumph, who shall seek you and say ? -
Enough of light is this for one life's span,
That all men born are mortal, but not man;
And we men bring death lives by night to sow,
That man may reap and eat and live by day.
SUPER FLUMINA BABYLONIS
B'
Y The waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
Remembering thee,
That for ages of agony hast endured, and slept,
And wouldst not see.
By the waters of Babylon we stood up and sang,
Considering thee,
That a blast of deliverance in the darkness rang,
To set thee free.
And with trumpets and thunderings and with morning song
Came up the light;
And thy spirit uplifted thee to forget thy wrong
As day doth night.
## p. 14312 (#506) ##########################################
14312
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
And thy sons were dejected not any more, as then
When thou wast ashamed;
When thy lovers went heavily without heart, as men
Whose life was maimed.
ride behind him. She carried me on her lap, in a box tied about
her waist. The girl had lined it on all sides with the softest
cloth she could get, well quilted underneath; furnished it with
her baby's bed, provided me with linen and other necessaries,
and made everything as convenient as she could. We had no
## p. 14279 (#473) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14279
other company but a boy of the house, who rode after us with
the luggage.
My master's design was to show me in all the towns by the
way; and to step out of the road, for fifty or a hundred miles,
to any village or person of quality's house where he might
expect custom. We made easy journeys, of not above seven or
eight score miles a day; for Glumdalclitch, on purpose to spare
me, complained she was tired with the trotting of the horse.
She often took me out of my box, at my own desire, to give
me air and show me the country; but always held me fast by a
leading-string. We passed over five or six rivers, many degrees
broader and deeper than the Nile or the Ganges; and there was
hardly a rivulet so small as the Thames at London Bridge. We
were ten weeks in our journey, and I was shown in eighteen
large towns, besides many villages and private families.
On the 26th day of October we arrived at the metropolis,
called in their language Lorbrulgrud, or Pride of the Universe.
My master took a lodging in the principal street of the city, not
far from the royal palace, and put out bills in the usual form,
containing an exact description of my person and parts. He
hired a large room between three and four hundred feet wide.
He provided a table sixty feet in diameter, upon which I was to
act my part; and palisadoed it round three feet from the edge,
and as many high, to prevent my falling over. I was shown
ten times a day, to the wonder and satisfaction of all people. I
could now speak the language tolerably well, and perfectly un-
derstood every word that was spoken to me. Besides I had
learnt their alphabet, and could make a shift to explain a sen-
tence here and there; for Glumdalclitch had been my instructor
while we were at home, and at leisure hours during our journey.
She carried a little book in her pocket not much larger than a
Sanson's Atlas; it was a common treatise for the use of young
girls, giving a short account of their religion: out of this she
taught me my letters, and interpreted the words.
## p. 14280 (#474) ##########################################
14280
JONATHAN SWIFT
THE HOUYHNHNMS
From (Gulliver's Travels)
[The author having been set ashore by a mutinous crew in an unknown
land, falls in with a nondescript animal called the Yahoo, is at length taken
possession of by the Houyhnhnms (horses) and conducted to their home.
The horses mistake him for another sort of Yahoo, and attempt to civilize
him. )
M
ren,
Y PRINCIPAL endeavor was to learn the language: which my
master (for so I shall henceforth call him) and his child-
and every servant of his house, were desirous to
teach me; for they looked upon it as a prodigy that a brute
animal should discover such marks of a rational creature. I
pointed to everything and inquired the name of it, which I wrote
down in my journal-book when I was alone; and corrected my
bad accent by desiring those of the family to pronounce it often.
In this employment a sorrel nag, one of the under-servants, was
very ready to assist me.
In speaking they pronounce through the nose and throat; and
their language approaches nearest to the High Dutch or German
of any I know in Europe, but is much more graceful and signifi-
cant. The Emperor Charles V. made almost the same observa-
tion when he said that “If he were to speak to his horse, it
should be in High Dutch. ”
The curiosity and impatience of my master were so great,
that he spent many hours of his leisure to instruct me.
He was
convinced (as he afterwards told me) that I must be a Yahoo :
but my teachableness, civility, and cleanliness astonished him;
which were qualities altogether opposite to those animals. He
was most perplexed about my clothes: reasoning sometimes with
himself whether they were a part of my body; for I never pulled
them off till the family were asleep, and got them on before
they waked in the morning. My master was eager to learn
“whence I came; how I acquired those appearances of reason
which I discovered in all my actions, and to know my story from
my own mouth; which he hoped he should soon do, by the great
proficiency I made in learning and pronouncing their words and
sentences. ” To help my memory, I formed all I learned into
the English alphabet, and writ the words down, with the transla-
tions. This last after some time I ventured to do in my master's
## p. 14281 (#475) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14281
presence. It cost me much trouble to explain to him what I was
doing, for the inhabitants have not the least idea of books or
literature.
In about ten weeks' time I was able to understand most of
his questions, and in three months could give him some tolerable
answers. He was extremely curious to know “from what part of
the country I came, and how I was taught to imitate a rational
creature; because the Yahoos (whom he saw I exactly resembled
in my head, hands, and face, that were only visible), with some
appearance of cunning, and the strongest disposition to mischief,
were observed to be the most unteachable of all brutes. " I
answered that “I came over the sea from a far place, with
many others of my own kind, in a great hollow vessel, made of
the bodies of trees; that my companions forced me to land on
this coast, and then left me to shift for myself. ” It was with
some difficulty, and by the help of many signs, that I brought
him to understand me. He replied that “I must needs be mis-
taken, or that I said the thing which was not: ” for they have no
word in their language to express lying or falsehood. He knew
it was impossible that there could be a country beyond the sea,
or that a parcel of brutes could move a wooden vessel whither
they pleased upon water.
He was
no Houyhnhnm alive
could make such a vessel, nor would trust Yahoos to manage it.
The word Houyhnhnm, in their tongue, signifies “a horse”;
and in its etymology, “the perfection of nature. ” I told my mas-
ter that "I was at a loss for expression, but would improve as
fast as I could, and hoped in a short time I should be able to
tell him wonders. ” He was pleased to direct his own mare, his
colt and foal, and the servants of the family, to take all opportu-
nities of instructing me; and every day, for two or three hours,
he was at the same pains himself. Several horses and mares of
quality in the neighborhood came often to our house, upon the
report spread of "a wonderful Yahoo, that could speak like a
Houyhnhnm, and seemed, in his words and actions, to discover
some glimmerings of reason. ” These delighted to converse with
me; they put many questions, and received such answers as I
was able to return. By all these advantages I made so great a
progress, that in five months from my arrival I understood what-
ever was spoken, and could express myself tolerably well.
The Houyhnhnms, who came to visit my master out of a de-
sign of seeing and talking with me, could hardly believe me to
sure
»
»
## p. 14282 (#476) ##########################################
14282
JONATHAN SWIFT
This I pres-
-
be a right Yahoo, because my body had a different covering from
others of my kind. They were astonished to observe me without
the usual hair or skin, except on my head, face, and hands; but I
discovered that secret to my master, upon an accident which hap-
pened about a fortnight before.
I have already told the reader that every night, when the
family were gone to bed, it was my custom to strip, and cover
myself with my clothes. It happened, one morning early, that
my master sent for me by the sorrel nag, who was his valet.
When he came I was fast asleep, my clothes fallen off on one
side, and my shirt above my waist. I awakened at the noise he
made, and observed him to deliver his message in some disorder;
after which he went to my master, and in a great fright gave
him a very confused account of what he had seen.
ently discovered; for, going as soon as I was dressed to pay my
attendance upon his Honor, he asked me the meaning of what
“
his servant had reported,- that I was not the same thing when I
slept as I appeared to be at other times; that his valet assured
him some part of me was white, some yellow,- at least not so
white, - and some brown. ”
I had hitherto concealed the secret of my dress, in order to
distinguish myself as much as possible from that cursed race of
Yahoos; but now I found it in vain to do so any longer. Besides,
I considered that my clothes and shoes would soon wear out,
which already were in a declining condition, and must be sup-
plied by some contrivance, -- from the hides of Yahoos, or other
brutes, - whereby the whole secret would be known. I there.
fore told my master that in the country whence I came, those
of my kind always covered their bodies with the hairs of cer-
tain animals prepared by art, as well for decency as to avoid the
inclemencies of air, both hot and cold: of which, as to my own
person, I would give him immediate conviction, if he pleased to
commend me; only desiring his excuse if I did not expose those
parts that nature taught us to conceal. ” He said, “My discourse
was all very strange, but especially the last part: for he could
not understand why nature should teach to conceal what
nature had given; that neither himself nor family were ashamed
of any part of their bodies: but however I might do as I pleased. ”
Whereupon I first unbuttoned my coat, and pulled it off; I did
the same with my waistcoat; I drew off my shoes, stockings, and
breeches; I let my shirt down to my waist, and drew up the
us
## p. 14283 (#477) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14283
bottom, fastening it like a girdle about my middle, to hide my
nakedness.
My master observed the whole performance with great signs
of curiosity and admiration. He took up all my clothes in his
pastern, one piece after another, and examined them diligently;
he then stroked my body very gently, and looked round me
several times: after which he said it was plain I must be a per-
fect Yahoo, but that I differed very much from the rest of my
species in the softness, whiteness, and smoothness of my skin;
my want of hair in several parts of my body; the shape and
shortness of my claws behind and before; and my affectation of
walking continually on my two hinder feet. He desired to see
no more, and gave me leave to put on my clothes again, for I
was shuddering with cold.
I expressed my uneasiness at his giving me so often the
appellation of Yahoo,— an odious animal, for which I had so
utter a hatred and contempt; I begged he would forbear apply-
ing that word to me, and make the same order in his family,
and among his friends whom he suffered to see me. I requested
likewise, that “the secret of my having a false covering to my
body might be known to none but himself, at least as long as
my present clothing should last; for as to what the sorrel nag,
his valet, had observed, his Honor might command him to con-
ceal it. "
All this my master very graciously consented to; and thus
the secret was kept till my clothes began to wear out, which I
was forced to supply by several contrivances that shall hereafter
be mentioned. In the mean time he desired “I would go on
with my utmost diligence to learn their language, because he was
more astonished at my capacity for speech and reason than at
the figure of my body, whether it were covered or not”; adding
that he waited with some impatience to hear the wonders
which I promised to tell him. ”
Thenceforward he doubled the pains he had been at to in-
struct me: he brought me into all company, and made them
treat me with civility; "because,” as he told them privately,
“this would put me into good humor, and make me
diverting. ”
Every day, when I waited on him, besides the trouble he was
at in teaching, he would ask me several questions concerning
myself, which I answered as well as I could; and by these means
(
more
## p. 14284 (#478) ##########################################
14284
JONATHAN SWIFT
he had already received some general ideas, though very imper-
fect. It would be tedious to relate the several steps by which I
advanced to a more regular conversation; but the first account
I gave of myself in any order and length was to this purpose: -
That "I came from a very far country, as I already had
attempted to tell him, with about fifty more of my own species;
that we traveled upon the seas in a great hollow vessel made of
wood, and larger than his Honor's house. " I described the ship
to him in the best terms I could, and explained by the help of
my handkerchief displayed, how it was driven forward by the
wind. “That upon a quarrel among us, I was set on shore on
this coast, where I walked forward, without knowing whither, till
he delivered me from the persecution of those execrable Yahoos. ”
He asked me, "Who made the ship, and how it was possible that
the Houyhnhnms of my country would leave it to the manage-
ment of brutes ? My answer was, that “I durst proceed no
further in my relation unless he would give me his word and
honor that he would not be offended, and then I would tell him
the wonders I had so often promised. ” He agreed; and I went
on by assuring him that the ship was made by creatures like
myself, who in all the countries I had traveled, as well as in my
own, were the only governing rational animals: and that upon
my arrival hither, I was as much astonished to see the Houyhn-
hnms act like rational beings as he or his friends could be in
finding some marks of reason in a creature he was pleased to
call a Yahoo; to which I owned my resemblance in every part,
but could not account for their degenerate and brutal nature.
I said further that “If good fortune ever restored me to my
native country, to relate my travels hither, as I resolved to do,
everybody would believe that I said the thing that was not-
that I invented the story out of my own head; and (with all pos-
sible respect to himself, his family, and friends, and under his
promise of not being offended), our countrymen would hardly
think it probable that a Houyhnhnm should be the presiding
creature of a nation, and a Yahoo the brute. ”
My master heard me with great appearances of uneasiness in
his countenance; because doubting, or not believing, are so little
known in this country, that the inhabitants cannot tell how to
behave themselves under such circumstances. And I remember,
in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of
manhood in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of
C
## p. 14285 (#479) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14285
»
lying and false representation, it was with much difficulty that
he comprehended what I meant, although he had otherwise a
most acute judgment; for he argued thus: “That the use of
speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive
information of facts; now, if any one said the thing which was
not, these ends were defeated, because I cannot properly be said
to understand him: and I am so far from receiving information
that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am led to
believe a thing black when it is white, and short when it is long. ”
And these were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of
lying, so perfectly well understood and so universally practiced
among human creatures.
To return from this digression. When I asserted that the
Yahoos were the only governing animals in my country, which
my master said was altogether past his conception, he desired to
know whether we “had Houyhnhnms among us, and what was
their employment ? » I told him, “We had great numbers; that
in summer they grazed in the fields, and in winter were kept in
houses with hay and oats, where Yahoo servants were employed
to rub their skins smooth, comb their manes, pick their feet, serve
them with food, and make their beds. ” “I understand you well,”
said my master: "it is now very plain, from all you have spoken,
that whatever share of reason the Yahoos pretend to, the Houyhn-
hnms are your masters. I heartily wish our Yahoos would be
so tractable. ” I begged his Honor “would please to excuse me
from proceeding any further, because I was very certain that the
account he expected from me would be highly displeasing. ” But
he insisted in commanding me to let him know the best and
the worst. I told him he should be obeyed. ” I owned that
“the Houyhnhnms among us, whom we called horses, were the
most generous and comely animal we had: that they excelled
in strength and swiftness, and when they belonged to persons of
quality, were employed in traveling, racing, or drawing chariots;
they were treated with much kindness and care, till they fell
into diseases, or became foundered in the feet: but then they
were sold, and used to all kinds of drudgery till they died: after
which their skins were stripped, and sold for what they were
worth, and their bodies left to be devoured by dogs and birds of
prey. But the common race of horses had not so good fortune;
being kept by farmers and carriers, and other mean people, who
put them to greater labor and fed them worse. ” I described as
## p. 14286 (#480) ##########################################
14286
JONATHAN SWIFT
well as I could our way of riding; the shape and use of a bridle,
a saddle, a spur, and a whip; of harness and wheels. I added
that we fastened plates of a certain hard substance called iron
at the bottom of their feet, to preserve their hoofs from being
broken by the stony ways on which we often traveled.
My master, after some expressions of great indignation, won-
dered “how we dared to venture upon a Houyhnhnm's back; for
he was sure that the weakest servant in his house would be able
to shake off the strongest Yahoo, or by lying down and rolling
on his back, squeeze the brute to death. ” I answered that «Our
horses were trained up, from three or four years old, to the
several uses we intended them for: that if any of them proved
intolerably vicious, they were employed for carriages; that they
were severely beaten, while they were young, for any mischievous
tricks; that the males designed for the common use of riding
or draught were generally castrated about two years after their
birth, to take down their spirits, and make them more tame and
gentle: that they were indeed sensible of rewards and punish-
ments; but his Honor would please to consider that they had
not the least tincture of reason, any more than the Yahoos in
this country. ”
It put me to the pains of many circumlocutions to give my
master a right idea of what I spoke; for their language does not
abound in variety of words, because their wants and passions are
fewer than among us. But it is impossible to express his noble
resentment at our savage tre ment of the Houyhnhnm race;
particularly after I had explained the manner and use of cas-
trating horses among us to hinder them from propagating their
kind, and to render them more servile. He said, “If it were
possible there could be any country where Yahoos alone were
endued with reason, they certainly must be the governing animal;
because reason in time will always prevail against brutal strength.
But considering the frame of our bodies, and especially of mine,
he thought no creature of equal bulk was so ill contrived for
employing that reason in the common offices of life;” whereupon
he desired to know whether “those among whom I lived resem.
bled me or the Yahoos of his country. ” I assured him that “I
was as well shaped as most of my age; but the younger, and the
females, were much more soft and tender, and the skins of the
latter generally as white as milk. ” He said, “I differed indeed
from other Yahoos, being much more cleanly and not altogether
## p. 14287 (#481) ##########################################
JONATHAN SWIFT
14287
(
-
so deformed; but in point of real advantage, he thought I differed
for the worse. That my nails were of no use either to my fore
or hinder feet: as to my fore-feet, he could not properly call
them by that name, for he never observed me to walk upon
them, – that they were too soft to bear the ground; that I gener-
ally went with them uncovered; neither was the covering I some-
times wore on them of the same shape or so strong as that on
my feet behind. That I could not walk with any security, for
if either of my hinder feet slipped, I must inevitably fall. ” He
then began to find fault with other parts of my body:— «The
fatness of my face, the prominence of my nose, mine eyes
placed directly in front, so that I could not look on either side
without turning my head; that I was not able to feed myself
without lifting one of my fore-feet to my mouth, and therefore
nature had placed those joints to answer that necessity. He
knew not what could be the use of those several clefts and divis-
ions in my feet behind, - that these were too soft to bear the
hardness and sharpness of stones, without a covering made from
the skin of some other brute; that my whole body wanted a
fence against heat and cold, which I was forced to put on and
off every day with tediousness and trouble. And lastly, that
he observed every animal in this country naturally to abhor the
Yahoos; whom the weaker avoided, and the stronger drove from
them. So that, supposing us to have the gift of reason, he
could not see how it were possible to cure that natural antipathy
which every creature discovered against us; nor, consequently,
,
how we could tame and render them serviceable. However, he
would, as he said, “debate the matter no further; because he
was more desirous to know my story, the country where I was
born, and the several actions and events of my life before I came
hither. »
-
THE STRULDBRUGS
From (Gulliver's Travels)
0
NE day, in much good company [among the Luggnaggians)
I was asked by a person of quality, “whether I had seen
any of their struldbrugs, or immortals ? » I said, "I had
not;” and desired he would explain to me what he meant by
such an appellation, applied to a mortal creature. He told me
## p. 14288 (#482) ##########################################
14288
JONATHAN SWIFT
(
(c
that "sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born
in a family, with a red circular spot on the forehead, directly
over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it
should never die. The spot," as he described it, was about the
compass of a silver threepence, but in the course of time grew
larger, and changed its color: for at twelve years of age it be-
came green, so continued till five-and-twenty, then turned a deep
blue; at five-and-forty it grew coal-black, and as large as an
English shilling, but never admitted any further alteration. ”
After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the
struldbrugs among them. He said, “They commonly acted like
mortals till about thirty years old; after which by degrees they
grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came
to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession; for
otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species
born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation
by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the
extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the .
follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which
arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not
only opinionated, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but
incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which
never descended below their grandchildren, Envy and impotent
desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against
which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the
younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the
former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleas-
ure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine
that others are gone to a harbor of rest to which they themselves
never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of any.
thing but what they learned and observed in their youth and
middle age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or
particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition
than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among
them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose
their memories: these meet with more pity and assistance be-
cause they want many bad qualities which abound in others. ”
## p. 14289 (#483) ##########################################
14289
S
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
(1837-)
BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE
ARLY in the eighties, there were living in England six great
poets, whose work had given to the later Victorian era of
English song a splendor almost comparable to that of the
Elizabethan and later Georgian periods. All of these poets but one
have now passed away (Rossetti in 1882, Arnold in 1888, Browning in
1889, Tennyson in 1892, and Morris in 1896), leaving Mr. Swinburne in
solitary pre-eminence. In this year of the
Queen's Jubilee he is left with no possible
rival among the living; and stands as the
Victorian poet par excellence in a peculiarly
literal sense, for he was born in the year
of her Majesty's accession to the throne,
which makes his sixty years conterminous
with the sixty years of her reign. So little
has been made public concerning that life,
that his personality has remained even
more closely veiled than was that of Tenny-
son; and the facts at the command of the
biographer are of the most meagre descrip-
tion. He was the son of a distinguished ALGERNON SWINBURNE
officer of the Royal Navy; and on his moth-
er's side, descended from the third Earl of Ashburnham. He. was
educated at Balliol College, Oxford, but left in 1860 without taking
a degree. A journey to Italy followed; made chiefly for the purpose
of paying a tribute of affectionate admiration to the old poet Lan-
dor, then nearing the close of his days in Florence.
The greater
part of Mr. Swinburne's life has been spent in England: for a time he
lived in London with the Rossetti brothers and Mr. George Meredith;
but for many years past his home has been at Wimbledon, where
he has kept house with Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, the distinguished
critic and the closest of his friends.
Mr. Swinburne made his first appearance in literature as a dra-
matic poet; and published in rapid succession the four dramas
Rosamond' (1860), «The Queen Mother' (1860), Atalanta in Caly-
don' (1865), and Chastelard (1865). The first of these works has for
XIV–894
## p. 14290 (#484) ##########################################
14290
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
>
its subject the idyl and tragedy of Henry II. at Woodstock, the sec-
ond the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the last an episode in the
early life of Mary Stuart at the French court. Atalanta in Calydon
is a noble tragedy upon a Greek theme, and written in as close a
reproduction of the Greek manner as it is likely to be given to any
modern poet to achieve. These four works gained for their author a
considerable reputation with cultivated readers, yet made no direct
appeal to the wider public. But the situation became changed in the
year that followed the appearance of Chastelard,'— the year of the
famous Poems and Ballads) (1866). It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that no other volume of English poetry published before or
since, ever created so great a sensation as this. If Byron awoke to
find himself famous the day after the first cantos of Childe Harold'
made their appearance, Mr. Swinburne awoke to find himself both
famous and notorious. For the Poems and Ballads) not only showed
that a new poet had arisen with a voice of his own, and possessed
of an absolutely unexampled command of the resources of English
rhythm, but they also showed that the author deemed fit for poetical
treatment certain passional aspects of human life concerning which
the best English tradition had hitherto been one of reticence. The
unerring instinct of sensational journalism at once sought out for
discussion these poems (perhaps a dozen in number) of question-
able propriety; and before the year was over, the volume had become
the subject of a discussion so ample and so heated that a parallel is
hardly to be found in the history of English literature.
This discussion has proved peculiarly unfortunate for the poet's
fame; since there has grown out of it a legend which still persists
in the popular consciousness, and which embodies a view of the poet
so distorted and so grotesquely untrue, that those who are acquainted
with his work as a whole can only smile helplessly and wait for time
to set matters right. The facts of the matter are simply these: The
Poems and Ballads ) was essentially a first book. Its contents had
been written for the most part by a mere boy, long before their col-
lection into a volume; and bear about the same relation to his mature
work as is borne by the vaporings of Shelley's Queen Mab' to Pro-
metheus Unbound' and Epipsychidion. The objectionable pieces
are few in number, and probably no one regrets more than the author
himself the defective taste which permitted them to be preserved.
«They are obviously,” to quote from a recent critic, “the hasty and
violent defiance hurled in the face of British Philistinism by a youth-
ful writer, who, in addition to the exuberance of his scorn of conven-
tions, was also, it is plain, influenced by a very boyish desire to shock
the dull respectabilities of the average Philistine. ” But the unfair
critical onslaught upon these poems (utterly ignoring the many pure
and elevated numbers found in the same volume) was so noisy that
(
## p. 14291 (#485) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14291
its echo has been prolonged; and the opinion still obtains in many
quarters that sensuality is the chief attribute of a poet who in reality
might be charged with the fault of excessive spirituality, so far above
earth and so tenuous is the atmosphere in which he has his intellect-
ual being. If we accept Milton's dictum that poetry should be sim-
ple, sensuous, and passionate, it may be admitted that Mr. Swinburne
has passion (although mainly of the intellectual sort), but he is rarely
simple; while in sensuous charm he is distinctly inferior to more than
one of his contemporaries.
The even-minded critic of Mr. Swinburne's poetry thirty years
ago (and there were such, notable among them being Richard Grant
White and Mr. Stedman) might discern from an examination of the
five works already mentioned, the leading traits that so many other
volumes were to develop. There were already then evident the aston-
ishing virtuosity in the use of English metres; the linguistic faculty,
by virtue of which the poet composed Greek, Latin, and French
verses with as much apparent readiness as English; the imitative
power which made it possible for him to write like Chaucer, or the
poets of the old ballad and the miracle play; the spiritual insight
which made Atalanta) so much more than a mere imitation of Greek
tragedy; the hero-worship which is so generous a trait of his charac-
ter; the defense of religion against theology and priestcraft; and the
intense love of liberty that breathes through all his work.
Since the year which made Mr. Swinburne's name familiar to all
lovers of English poetry, his activity has been unceasing. Produc-
tions in prose and verse have flowed from his pen at the rate of
about a volume annually; the complete list of his works embracing
upwards of thirty volumes, about one third of which are studies in
literary criticism. Although these latter volumes form an important
section of his writings, they must be dismissed with a few words.
There are three collections of miscellaneous critical essays; separate
monographs of considerable bulk upon Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Victor
Hugo, and William Blake, briefer monographs upon George Chapman
and Charlotte Bronté; a highly controversial examination of certain
literary reputations, Under the Microscope'; and several pamphlets
or less polemical in character. 'A Year's Letters,' which is
a sort of prose novelette, was written for periodical publication under
the pseudonym “Mrs. Horace Manners”; but has never been reprinted.
There are also many critical studies to be found in the pages of the
English monthly reviews; notable among them being a nearly com-
plete series of papers which examine in close detail the work of
the Elizabethan dramatists, and constitute, together with the published
volumes on Shakespeare, Jonson, and Chapman, the most exhaustive
and scholarly commentary that has yet been produced upon that
important body of English poetry. The style of these prose writings
more
## p. 14292 (#486) ##########################################
14292
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
is sui generis, and as astonishing in its way as that of Carlyle. It
defies imitation; which is probably fortunate, since it is not an alto-
gether admirable style. But with all its vehemence, its verbosity,
and its recondite allusiveness, it has somehow the power to carry the
reader with it; sweeping away his critical sense for the time being,
and compelling him to share in both the occasional prejudices and
the frequent enthusiasms of the writer. And after due allowance has
been made for the temperamental qualities of Mr. Swinburne, and
for the extravagances of his diction, there will be found to remain a
residuum of the highest critical value; so that it may fairly be said
that he has illuminated every subject that he has chosen to discuss.
In dealing with the volumes of poetry — about a score in num-
ber- of which nothing has yet been said, we are confronted with
an embarras de richesses. Chronologically, the earliest of them is the
(Songs Before Sunrise) (1871), and the latest (The Tale of Balen?
(1896). Perhaps the first thing that should be said about them, in
view of still current misconceptions, is that whatever taint of sensu-
ality clung to the productions of the poet's youth, the work of his
manhood is singularly free from any offense of this sort. In its dra-
matic portions, it handles the noblest of themes with superb creative
power, and deals with them in grave harmonious measures; in its
lyrical portions, it clothes an almost austere ideal of conduct in
melodies whose beauty is everlasting. The dramatic poems include
( Erechtheus,' a Greek tragedy fully as fine as 'Atalanta,' and exhibit-
ing more of artistic restraint; the two works (Bothwell and Mary
Stuart,' which complete the magnificent trilogy begun by “Chaste-
lard’; Marino Faliero,' a Venetian subject treated with splendid
effect; Locrine,' a tragedy suggested by Milton's Comus,' and upon
a theme dealt with by an unknown Elizabethan dramatist; and “The
Sisters,' a comparatively unimportant domestic tragedy. Strongly
dramatic in spirit, although in form a narrative in rhymed couplets,
the tale of (Tristram of Lyonesse' completes the list of Mr. Swin-
burne's longer poetical works down to “The Tale of Balen,' which is
essentially a verse paraphrase of a section of the Morte d'Arthur' of
Malory. The lyrical division of Mr. Swinburne's work includes two
additional series of 'Poems and Ballads'; the impassioned volume of
'Songs Before Sunrise,' inspired by the Italian revolutionary move-
ment, and dedicated to Mazzini, —a work which is probably the high-
est and most sustained expression of the poet's lyrical powers; the
(Songs of Two Nations, which includes the great (Song of Italy,'
the superb Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic,' and
the fierce sonnets called Diræ'; the Songs of the Springtides,'
whereof “Thalassius' -- a sort of spiritual autobiography, in which
the poet pays the noblest of his many tributes to the memory of
Landor — is the first and the greatest; the (Studies in Song,' which
## p. 14293 (#487) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14293
(
>
.
includes the wonderful lyrical group inspired By the North Sea';
the "Tristram' volume, which contains, besides the titular poem,
many other pieces, - among them A Dark Month, the group of
songs which has made their author the supreme English poet of
childhood; A Century of Roundels'; A Midsummer Holiday';
('
and Astrophel. ' Mention should also be made, as illustrating the
lighter aspect of Mr. Swinburne's genius, of the anonymously pub-
lished Heptalogia; or The Seven against Sense,' a collection of the
cleverest parodies ever written, in which the poet travesties his own
style with no less glee than the style of half a dozen of his contem-
poraries. If one would seek for further indications of his sense of
humor, they may be found in the poem Disgust,' which parodies
Tennyson's Despair,' and in the Report of the Proceedings on the
First Anniversary Session of the Newest Shakespeare Society.
'
The mere enumeration of Mr. Swinburne's works requires so
much space that little remains for any general comment upon them.
It should be said that he early outgrew the doctrine of art for
art's sake," and has made his verse more and more the ally of great
and worthy causes. Such ardent and whole-souled admiration of man
for man as finds expression in his many poems to Landor, Hugo,
and Mazzini, to say nothing of his many tributes to lesser men, is
hardly paralleled in literature. And the sweep of his lyre becomes
more impressive when its strings are plucked in behalf of
France crushed beneath the heel of the usurper; of Italy struggling
to be free. The fierce indignation with which he inveighs against
all the social, political, and religious forces that array themselves
against the freedom of the body and soul of man, the glowing patri-
otism which fires his song when its theme is the proud heritage of
achievement to which every Englishman is born, and the prophetic
inspiration which imparts to him the vision of a regenerated human-
ity, and all the wonder that shall be when “the world's great age
begins anew” and “the golden years return,” – these are indeed sub-
jects for the noblest sort of poetical expression; and they are the
very warp and woof of the many-colored verbal fabric that has come
from Mr. Swinburne's loom. And with these great words spoken for
mankind in the abstract there comes also a personal message, exalt-
ing the virtues of heroism, and sacrifice of self, and steadfast devotion
to high impersonal ends,- a message that finds its highest embodi. .
ment in such poems as “Super Flumina Babylonis,' and (The Pil-
grims,' and 'Thalassius'; a message that enforces as fine an ethical
ideal of individual conduct as may be found anywhere in English lit-
erature.
even
Drapeysers
## p. 14294 (#488) ##########################################
14294
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
DEDICATION
1865
THE
He sea gives her shells to the shingle,
The earth gives her streams to the sea;
They are many, but my gift is single,
My verses, the first fruits of me.
Let the wind take the green and the gray leaf,
Cast forth without fruit upon air;
Take rose-leaf and vine-leaf and bay-leaf
Blown loose from the hair.
The night shakes them round me in legions,
Dawn drives them before her like dreams;
Time sheds them like snows on strange regions,
Swept shoreward on infinite streams;
Leaves pallid and sombre and ruddy
Dead fruits of the fugitive years;
Some stained as with wine and made bloody,
And some as with tears.
Some scattered in seven years' traces,
As they fell from the boy that was then;
Long left among idle green places,
Or gathered but now among men;
On seas full of wonder and peril,
Blown white round the capes of the north;
Or in islands where myrtles are sterile
And loves bring not forth.
O daughters of dreams and of stories
That life is not wearied of yet, -
Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
Felise and Yolande and Juliette, -
Shall I find you not still, shall I miss you,
When sleep that is true or that seems
Comes back to me hopeless to kiss you,
O daughters of dreams?
They are past as a slumber that passes,
As the dew of a dawn of old time;
More frail than the shadows on glasses,
More fleet than a wave or a rhyine.
As the waves after ebb drawing seaward,
When their hollows are full of the night,
## p. 14295 (#489) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14295
So the birds that flew singing to me-ward
Recede out of sight.
The songs of dead seasons that wander
On wings of articulate words;
Lost leaves that the shore-wind may squander,
Light flocks of untamable birds:
Some sang to me dreaming in class-time,
And truant in hand as in tongue;
For the youngest were born of boy's pastime,
The eldest are young.
Is there shelter while life in them lingers,
Is there hearing for songs that recede,
Tunes touched from a harp with men's fingers
Or blown with boy's mouth in a reed?
Is there place in the land of your labor,
Is there room in your world of delight,
Where change has not sorrow for neighbor
And day has not night?
In their wings though the sea-wind yet quivers,
Will you spare not a space for them there,
Made green with the running of rivers
And gracious with temperate air;
In the fields and turreted cities,
That cover from sunshine and rain
Fair passions and bountiful pities
And loves without strain ?
In a land of clear colors and stories,
In a region of shadowless hours,
Where earth has a garment of glories
And a murmur of musical flowers;
In woods where the spring half uncovers
The flush of her amorous face,
By the waters that listen for lovers, -
For these is there place?
For the song-birds of sorrow, that muffle
Their music as clouds do their fire;
For the storm-birds of passion, that ruffle
Wild wings in a wind of desire;
In the stream of the storm as it setties
Blown seaward, borne far from the sun,
Shaken loose on the darkness like petals
Dropt one after one ?
## p. 14296 (#490) ##########################################
14296
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Though the world of your hands be more gracious,
And lovelier in lordship of things
Clothed round by sweet art with the spacious
Warm heaven of her imminent wings,
Let them enter, unfledged and nigh fainting,
For the love of old loves and lost times;
And receive in your palace of painting
This revel of rhymes.
Though the seasons of man full of losses
Make empty the years full of youth,
If but one thing be constant in crosses,
Change lays not her hand upon truth;
Hopes die, and their tombs are for token
That the grief, as the joy, of them ends
Ere time that breaks all men has broken
The faith between friends.
Though the many lights dwindle to one light,
There is help if the heaven has one;
Though the skies be discrowned of the sunlight
And the earth dispossessed of the sun,
They have moonlight and sleep for repayment,
When, refreshed as a bride, and set free
With stars and sea-winds in her raiment,
Night sinks on the sea.
HYMN TO PROSERPINE
AFTER THE PROCLAMATION IN ROME OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
Vicisti, Galilæe
I
HAVE lived long enough, having seen one thing,— that love hath an
end:
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh
or that weep:
For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;
But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.
Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harp-string of gold,
A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold ?
I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain
To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain.
## p. 14297 (#491) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14297
For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,
We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death.
O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!
From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains,
men say
New Gods are crowned in the city, their fowers have broken your
rods:
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were.
Time and the Gods are at strife: ye dwell in the midst thereof,
Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.
I say to you, Cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, Be at peace,
Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean ? but these thou shalt not take:
The laurel, the palms, and the pæan, the breast of the nymphs in the
brake,-
Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that Aicker like fire.
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things?
Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.
A little while and we die: shall life not thrive as it may ?
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labor, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years ?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray
from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
Sleep, shall we sleep after all ? for the world is not sweet in the end;
For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.
Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;
But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of
the tides.
O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods !
O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!
Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not, neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.
All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast
Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the
past:
## p. 14298 (#492) ##########################################
14298
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
as
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-
gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits;
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas
with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled.
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the
world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north wind bound; and its salt is of all men's
tears:
With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years;
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour:
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that
devour;
And its vapor and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to
be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of
the sea;
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the
air :
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is
made bare.
Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea
with rods?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye
Gods?
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at
last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of
things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you
for kings.
Though the feet of thine high-priests tread where thy lords and our
forefathers trod,
Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a
God,
Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her
head,
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee
dead.
## p. 14299 (#493) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14299
Of the maiden thy mother, men sing as a goddess with grace clad
around:
Thou art throned where another was king: where another was queen
she is crowned.
Yea, once we had sight of another; but now she is queen, say these.
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering
seas,
Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the
foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,
Her deep hair heavily laden with odor and color of flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendor, a flame,
Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her
name.
For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she
Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on
the sea,
And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.
Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token ? we wist that ye should not
fall.
Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all.
But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end :
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also, I also, thy brother: I go as I came unto earth.
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night
where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from
the heart,
Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red
rose is white,
And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of
the night,
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star,
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and
undone.
Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal
breath:
For these give labor and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
## p. 14300 (#494) ##########################################
14300
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.
THE GARDEN OF PROSERPINE
H*
ERE, where the world is quiet;
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
Here life has death for neighbor,
And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labor,
Weak ships and spirits steer:
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
And no such things grow here.
No growth of moor or coppice,
No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies,
Green grapes of Proserpine;
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes,
Save this whereout she crushes
For dead men deadly wine.
## p. 14301 (#495) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14301
Pale, without name or number,
In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
Comes out of darkness morn.
Though one were strong as seven,
He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
In the end it is not well.
Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love's who fears to greet her,
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands.
She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her, and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.
There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things:
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.
## p. 14302 (#496) ##########################################
14302
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure;
To-day will die to-morrow;
Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor winter leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
HESPERIA
0
UT of the golden remote wild west where the sea without shore
is,
Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fullness of joy,
As a wind sets in with the autumn that blows from the region of
stories,
Blows with a perfume of songs and of memories beloved from a boy,
Blows from the capes of the past oversea to the bays of the present,
Filled as with shadow of sound with the pulse of invisible feet,
Far out to the shallows and straits of the future, by rough ways or
pleasant -
Is it thither the wind's wings beat ? is it hither to me, O my
sweet ?
## p. 14303 (#497) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14303
as
a
For thee, in the stream of the deep tide-wind blowing in with the
water,
Thee I behold as a bird borne in with the wind from the west,
Straight from the sunset, across white waves whence rose
daughter
Venus thy mother, in years when the world was a water at rest.
Out of the distance of dreams, as a dream that abides after slumber,
Strayed from the fugitive flock of the night, when the moon overhead
Wanes in the wan waste heights of the heaven, and stars without
number
Die without sound, and are spent like lamps that are burnt by the
dead, -
Comes back to me, stays by me, lulls me with touch of forgotten
caresses,
One warm dream clad about with a fire as of life that endures :
The delight of thy face, and the sound of thy feet, and the wind of
thy tresses,
And all of a man that regrets, and all of a maid that allures.
But thy bosom is warm for my face, and profound as a manifold
flower,
Thy silence as music, thy voice as an odor that fades in a flame;
Not a dream, not a dream is the kiss of thy mouth, and the bounti-
ful hour
That makes me forget what was sin, and would make me forget were
it shame.
Thine eyes that are quiet, thine hands that are tender, thy lips that
are loving,
Comfort and cool me as dew in the dawn of a moon like a dream;
And my heart yearns baffled and blind, moved vainly toward thee,
and moving
As the refluent seaweed moves in the languid exuberant stream,
Fair as a rose is on earth, as a rose under water in prison,
That stretches and swings to the slow passionate pulse of the sea,
Closed up from the air and the sun, but alive, as a ghost re-arisen,
Pale as the love that revives as a ghost re-arisen in me.
From the bountiful infinite west, from the happy memorial places
Full of the stately repose and the lordly delight of the dead,
Where the fortunate islands are lit with the light of ineffable faces,
And the sound of a sea without wind is about them, and sunset is
red,
Come back to redeem and release me from love that recalls and re-
presses,
That cleaves to my flesh as a flame, till the serpent has eaten his fill;
## p. 14304 (#498) ##########################################
14304
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
From the bitter delights of the dark, and the feverish, the furtive
caresses
That murder the youth in a man or ever his heart have its will.
Thy lips cannot laugh and thine eyes cannot weep; thou art pale as
a rose is,
Paler and sweeter than leaves that cover the blush of the bud:
And the heart of the flower is compassion, and pity the core it
incloses,
Pity, not love, that is born of the breath and decays with the blood.
As the cross that a wild nun clasps till the edge of it bruises her
bosom,
So love wounds as we grasp it, and blackens and burns as a flame;
I have loved overmuch in my life: when the live bud bursts with the
blossom,
Bitter as ashes or tears is the fruit, and the wine thereof shame.
As a heart that its anguish divides is the green bud cloven asunder;
As the blood of a man self-slain is the flush of the leaves that
allure;
And the perfume as poison and wine to the brain, a delight and a
wonder;
And the thorns are too sharp for a boy, too slight for a man, to
endure.
Too soon did I love it, and lost love's rose; and I cared not for
glory's:
Only the blossoms of sleep and of pleasure were mixed in my hair.
Was it myrtle or poppy thy garland was woven with, O my Dolores?
Was it pallor of slumber, or blush as of blood, that I found in thee
fair ?
For desire is a respite from love, and the flesh not the heart is her
fuel;
She was sweet to me once, who am fled and escaped from the rage
of her reign;
Who behold as of old time at hand as I turn, with her mouth grow-
ing cruel,
And flushed as with wine with the blood of her lovers, Our Lady of
Pain.
Low down where the thicket is thicker with thorns than with leaves
in the summer,
In the brake is a gleaming of eyes and a hissing of tongues that I
knew;
And the lithe long throats of her snakes reach round her, their
mouths overcome her,
And her lips grow cool with their foam, made moist as a desert
with dew.
## p. 14305 (#499) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14305
With the thirst and the hunger of lust though her beautiful lips be
so bitter,
(smile;
With the cold foul foam of the snakes, they soften and redden and
And her fierce mouth sweetens, her eyes wax wide, and her eyelashes
glitter,
And she laughs with a savor of blood in her face, and a savor of
guile.
She laughs, and her hands reach hither, her hair blows hither and
hisses,
As a low-lit flame in a wind, back-blown till it shudder and leap:
Let her lips not again lay hold on my soul, nor her poisonous kisses,
To consume it alive and divide from thy bosom, Our Lady of Sleep.
Ah, daughter of sunset and slumber, if now it return into prison,
Who shall redeem it anew? but we, if thou wilt, let us fly;
Let us take to us, now that the white skies thrill with a moon un-
arisen,
Swift horses of fear or of love, take flight and depart and not die.
They are swifter than dreams, they are stronger than death; there
is none that hath ridden,
None that shall ride in the dim strange ways of his life as we ride:
By the meadows of memory, the highlands of hope, and the shore
that is hidden,
Where life breaks loud and unseen, a sonorous invisible tide;
By the sands where sorrow has trodden, the salt pools bitter and
sterile,
By the thundering reef and the low sea-wall and the channel ºf
years,
Our wild steeds press on the night, strain hard through pleasure and
peril,
Labor and listen, and pant not or pause for the peril that nears;
And the sound of them trampling the way cleaves night as an arrow
asunder;
And slow by the sandhill and swift by the down with its glimpses of
grass,
Sudden and steady the music, as eight hoofs trample and thunder,
Rings in the ear of the low blind wind of the night as we pass;
Shrill shrieks in our faces the blind bland air that was mute as a
maiden,
Stung into storm by the speed of our passage, and deaf where we
past;
And our spirits too burn as we bound, thine holy but mine heavy-
laden,
As we burn with the fire of our flight: ah, love, shall we win at the
last ?
XXIV—895
## p. 14306 (#500) ##########################################
14306
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
IN MEMORY OF WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
B“CK
ACK to the flower-town, side by side,
The bright months bring,
New-born, the bridegroom and the bride,
Freedom and spring.
The sweet land laughs from sea to sea,
Filled full of sun;
All things come back to her, being free -
All things but one.
In many a tender wheaten plot,
Flowers that were dead
Live, and old suns revive; but not
That holier head.
By this white wandering waste of sea,
Far north, I hear
One face shall never turn to me
As once this year;
Shall never smile and turn and rest
On mine as there,
Nor one most sacred hand be prest
Upon my hair.
I came as one whose thoughts half linger,
Half run before;
The youngest to the oldest singer
That England bore.
I found him whom I shall not find
Till all grief end,
In holiest age our mightiest mind,
Father and friend.
But thou, if anything endure,
If hope there be,
O spirit that man's life left pure,
Man's death set free,-
Not with disdain of days that were,
Look earthward now:
Let dreams revive the reverend hair,
The imperial brow:
Come back in sleep; for in the life
Where thou art not
## p. 14307 (#501) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14307
We find none like thee. Time and strife
And the world's lot
Move thee no more; but love at least
And reverent heart
May move thee, royal and released
Soul, as thou art.
And thou, his Florence, to thy trust
Receive and keep-
Keep safe his dedicated dust,
His sacred sleep.
So shall thy lovers, come from far,
Mix with thy name
As morning-star with evening-star
His faultless fame.
A FORSAKEN GARDEN
I
N A coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn incloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed,
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand ?
So long have the gray bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briers if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.
The dense hard passage is blind and stifled,
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken -
These remain.
## p. 14308 (#502) ##########################################
14308
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song:
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long
The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath;
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.
Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,”
Did he whisper? -«look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam flowers endure when the rose blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die — but we ? »
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden's last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.
Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end; but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea, as a rose must wither, -
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them,
Or the wave.
All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea;
Not a breath of the time that has been, hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We shall sleep.
Here death may deal not again for ever;
Here change may come not till all change end.
## p. 14309 (#503) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14309
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left naught living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing, -
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be ;
Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea,
Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and•meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink.
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.
THE PILGRIMS
W"
was
ho is your lady of love, O ye that pass
Singing ? and is it for sorrow of that which
That ye sing sadly, or dream of what shall be ?
For gladly at once and sadly it seems ye sing. –
Our lady of love by you is unbeholden:
For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor lips, nor golden
Treasure of hair, nor face, nor form; but we
That love, we know her more fair than anything.
Is she a queen, having great gifts to give ? -
Yea, these; that whoso hath seen her shall not live
Except he serve her sorrowing, with strange pain,
Travail and bloodshedding and bitterer tears;
And when she bids die he shall surely die.
And he shall leave all things under the sky,
And go forth naked under sun and rain,
And work and wait and watch out all his years.
Hath she on earth no place of habitation ? -
Age to age calling, nation answering nation,
Cries out, Where is she? and there is none to say:
For if she be not in the spirit of men,
For if in the inward soul she hath no place,
In vain they cry unto her, seeking her face,
In vain their mouths make much of her; for they
Cry with vain tongues, till the heart lives again.
## p. 14310 (#504) ##########################################
14310
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
O ye that follow, and have ye no repentance ?
For on your brows is written mortal sentence,
An hieroglyph of sorrow, a fiery sign,
That in your lives ye shall not pause or rest,
Nor have the sure sweet common love, nor keep
Friends and safe days, nor joy of life nor sleep. -
These have we not, who have one thing, the divine
Face and clear eyes of faith and fruitful breast.
And ye shall die before your thrones be won. -
Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun
Shall move and shine without us, and we lie
Dead; but if she too move on earth and live,
But if the old world with all the old irons rent
Laugh and give thanks, shall we be not content ?
Nay, we shall rather live, we shall not die,
Life being so little and death so good to give.
And these men shall forget you. — Yea, but we
Shall be a part of the earth and the ancient sea,
And heaven's high air august, and awful fire,
And all things good; and no man's heart shall beat
But somewhat in it of our blood once shed
Shall quiver and quicken, as now in us the dead
Blood of men slain and the old same life's desire
Plants in their fiery footprints our fresh feet.
But ye that might be clothed with all things pleasant,
Ye are foolish that put off the fair soft present,
That clothe yourselves with the cold future air;
When mother and father and tender sister and brother
And the old live love that was shall be as ye,
Dust, and no fruit of loving life shall be. -
She shall be yet who is more than all these were,
Than sister or wife or father unto us, or mother.
Is this worth life, is this, to win for wages ?
Lo, the dead mouths of the awful gray-grown ages,
The venerable, in the past that is their prison,
In the outer darkness, in the unopening grave,
Laugh, knowing how many as ye now say have said,
How many, and all are fallen, are fallen and dead:
Shall ye dead rise, and these dead have not risen ? -
Not we but she, who is tender and swift to save.
## p. 14311 (#505) ##########################################
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14311
Are ye not weary and faint not by the way,
Seeing night by night devoured of day by day,
Seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire?
Sleepless; and ye too, when shall ye too sleep? -
We are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet,
And surely more than all things sleep were sweet,
Than all things save the inexorable desire
Which whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep.
Is this so sweet that one were fain to follow ?
Is this so sure where all men's hopes are hollow,
Even this your dream, that by much tribulation
Ye shall make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks
straight?
Nay, though our life were blind, our death were fruitless,
Not therefore were the whole world's high hope rootless;
But man to man, nation would turn to nation,
And the old life live, and the old great world be great.
Pass on then and pass by us and let us be,
For what light think ye after life to see?
And if the world fare better, will ye know?
And if man triumph, who shall seek you and say ? -
Enough of light is this for one life's span,
That all men born are mortal, but not man;
And we men bring death lives by night to sow,
That man may reap and eat and live by day.
SUPER FLUMINA BABYLONIS
B'
Y The waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
Remembering thee,
That for ages of agony hast endured, and slept,
And wouldst not see.
By the waters of Babylon we stood up and sang,
Considering thee,
That a blast of deliverance in the darkness rang,
To set thee free.
And with trumpets and thunderings and with morning song
Came up the light;
And thy spirit uplifted thee to forget thy wrong
As day doth night.
## p. 14312 (#506) ##########################################
14312
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
And thy sons were dejected not any more, as then
When thou wast ashamed;
When thy lovers went heavily without heart, as men
Whose life was maimed.
