PREFACE
A fresh heap would then begin to grow, till the day when the poet suddenly pounced upon it, and doomed it to the recesses of another newspaper. Through a great part of his life, Swinburne seems to have carried out this curious plan, and in earlier days, when he wandered from lodging-house to lodging-house, he must always have carried with him his carpet-bag of newspaper parcels.
It took a very long time to sort out the contents of these packages, and to examine and verify the poems which seemed to be unfamiliar. In this laborious and delightful work Mr. Wise was kind enough to associate me from the first, since Watts-Dunton's interest in the matter had become entirely a financial one. At last, in the summer of 1913, we satisfied ourselves that no more early poetry of a nature fitted for publication would turn up, and we began to arrange the discovered pieces which are now at last given to the public.
There is a section of Swinburne's lyrical writing which has often been talked of, but will not at present escape our guardianship. Once, in the sixties, Jowett drove the poet home from a dinner, and some one asking the Master afterwards how Swinburne had behaved, Jowett answered with an indulgent smile, "O, he sang all the way,— bad songs—very bad songs." The world is
xxiii.
