it up, as we often have been when Swinburne was not first rate. Did the magnolia bud of this large soul lodge a canker? Yet, though we can only surmise what his full-blown splendour might have been, he was ever so slightly opening; his latest sonnets are not only the most manifold, but deeper and almost fragrant.
"Seeing you have not come with me, nor spent
This day's suggestive beauty as we ought,
I have gone forth alone and been content
To make you mistress only of my thought."
"I am the field of undulating grass
And you the gentle perfume of the Spring,
And all my lyric being, when you pass,
Is bowed and filled with sudden murmuring."
"For I have ever gone untied and free,
The stars and my high thoughts for company;
Wet with the salt spray and the mountain showers,
I have had the sense of space and amplitude,
And love in many places, silver-shoed,
Has come and scattered all my path with flowers."
Four lines from two sonnets, six from a third, and you build up a new one richer and stronger than any of the three. For all these flashes are like the flap of a flame in a swirl of smoke; some pleasure in his own attitude, some self-assertion causes the momentary brilliance among the ever-flowing grey ghosts of scheduled ornament which make the bulk of a rhetorical style. But he has gentle, more promising moods.
"There have been times when I could storm and plead,
But you shall never hear me supplicate.
These long months that have magnified my need
Have made my asking less importunate;
For now small favours seem to me so great
That not the courteous lovers of old time
Were more content to rule themselves and wait,
Easing desire with discourse and sweet rhyme."
