me, personally, a poem is a thing that sings. One suffers from the dim weight of one's own soul, never from sense. I see some of them have been set to music, but that proves nothing. Musical words seldom set well : they have the tune in them already, and will not take another." ***** "As to Swinburne, I believe he has so much power over me that he will not let me read his bad things ; in the Poems and Ballads, the pages turned over as though some one else was turning them, till at the wonderful Litany the invisible presence said 'Halt ! ' I began and ended with that. One such poem is enough, not for a morning's reading, but for a lifetime, if only the last two lines might be prophetic —
'The gold is turned to a token,
The staff to a rod,
Yet thou shalt bind up them that are broken,
O Lord our God !'"
*****
" I find no reason why I should not read Swinburne's Poems:
certainly I had little more than an hour, and so perhaps had only
time to get the good in them. And of course it is possible that I
may have read something very bad without knowing it: in which
case it cannot have done me much harm. It is really comical,
after entering a book, as one would a fish-market, ready to close
eyes and nose, to find one's self in a grand heathen oratorio : —
heathen certainly, but, all the more for that, with a deep pathetic
truth underlying its despair and unrest. Surely such music cannot
be destined for Satan's palaces. * * * Do you remember
how Sir Walter Scott resolved to give up writing poetry after
reading Byron ? One could scarcely help coming to the same
determination after Swinburne ; only, I suppose, it would be like
