ABSTRACT
This long expected volume will not disappoint the admirers of Mr. Swinburne’s poetry. At least, it will not disappoint those who had the insight to perceive what a vast advance upon Poems and Ballads was the Songs before Sunrise. In this volume, as in that, there is the same passion for anapaestic and dactyllic rhythms, and the same mastery over them; there is the same lofty aspiration and belief in the high destiny of man, and there is the same equal balance of those forces which we call ‘intellectual’ against those forces which we ascribe to genius. For, never was there a greater mistake than the common one of supposing that, because Mr. Swinburne is not a concise writer, therefore his intellect lags behind his genius. ‘Hertha’, the ‘Hymn of Man’, and the more daring portions of Atalanta showed, to any truly critical mind, that intellectually Mr. Swinburne is second to almost none of his contemporaries.
