That tastes the sweet dark sea, and swims

Right eastward under strengthening skies,

And sees the gradual rippling rims Of waves whence day breaks blossomwise

Take fire ere light peer well above, And laughs from all his heart with love;

And softlier swimming, with raised head,

Feels the full flower of morning shed, And fluent sunrise round him rolled, That laps and laves his body bold With fluctuant heaven in water's stead, And urgent through the growing gold Strikes, and sees all the spray flash red,

And his soul takes the sun, and

yearns

For joy wherewith the sea's heart burns. . . .

There is nothing to approach it elsewhere in literature. It was founded on experience in the surf of Northumberland, and Swinburne's courage and zest as a bather were superb. But I was assured by earlier companions that he made remarkably little way by swimming, and that his feats were mainly of floating, his little body tossing on the breakers like a cork. This was the cause of the accident which so nearly cost him his life, when he was bathing at Etretat in 1870. He was caught by the race of the tide under the Porte d'Amont, because of the weakness of his stroke. He was pursued, floating like a medusa with shining hair outspread, and was caught a long way out to sea, behind the Petite Porte, by a yachtsman who, oddly enough, happened to be Guy de Maupassant. I may record that, in describing this incident to me not long after it happened, Swinburne said that he reflected with satisfaction, when he made up his mind that he must be drowned, that he had just finally revised the proofs of Songs before Sunrise,

and that he was only a little older than (I think he said, not so old as) Shelley when he was drowned. He further recorded that in the state of the tide the fishing-boat which saved him could not return for some time, and that the sailors wrapped him in a sail and perched him on the deck, where, to their amazement, he recited the poems of Victor Hugo in a very loud voice, until they got back to Etretat. These incidents are, I think, not mentioned by Guy de Maupassant in his very picturesque account of the occurrence.

No physiologist who studied the physical condition of Swinburne could avoid observing the violent elevation of spirits to which he was constantly subject. The slightest emotional excitement, of anger, or pleasure, or admiration, sent him into a state which could scarcely be called anything but convulsive. He was like that little geyser in Iceland, which is always simmering, but which, if it is irritated by having pieces of turf thrown into it, instantly boils over and flings its menacing column at the sky. I was never able to persuade myself whether the extraordinary spasmodic action of the arms and legs which accompanied these paroxysms was the result of nature or habit. It was violent and it was longcontinued, but I never saw that it produced fatigue. It gradually subsided into a graceful and smiling calm, sometimes even into somnolence, out of which, however, a provocative remark would instantly call up again the surprising spasm of the geyser. Swinburne seemed to me to divide his hours between violent intellectual excitement and sheer immobility, mental and physical. He would sit for a long time together without stirring a limb, his eyes fixed in a sort of trance, and only his lips shifting and shivering a little, without a sound.

The conception of Swinburne, indeed, as incessantly flamboyant and

convulsive, is so common that it may be of value to note that he was, on the contrary, sometimes pathetically plain. tive and distressed. The following impression, written down next day (January 4th, 1878), reveals a Swinburne little imagined by the public, but frequently enough to be observed in those days by intimate friends. It describes a somewhat later period than that on which I have hitherto dwelt:

"Swinburne has become very much at home with us, and, knowing our eating-times, he drops in every fortnight or so to dinner, and stays through the evening. All this winter he has been noticeably worn and feeble, sometimes tottering like an old man, and glad to accept a hand to help him up and down stairs. I hear he is very violent between whiles, but he generally visits us during the exhaustion and depression which follow his fits of excitement, when he is tired of his loneliness at Great James Street, and seems to crave the comfort of home-life and the petting that we lavish on him. Last night he arrived about 5 p.m.; he was waiting to see me when I came back from the office. The maid had seen him into my study, brightened the fire and raised the lamp, but although she left him cosily seated under the light, I found him mournfully wandering, like a lost thing, on the staircase. We happened to be quite alone, and he stayed on for six hours. He was extremely gentle, bright, and sensible at dinner, full of gay talk about early memories, his recollections of Dickens, and odd anecdotes of old Oxford friends, Jowett, Stubbs, and the present Bishop of Ely [James Russell Woodford]. Directly dinner was over he insisted on seeing the baby, whom on these occasions he always kisses, and worships on his knees, and is very fantastic over. When he and I were alone, he closed up to the fire, his great head bowed, his knees held tight to

gether, and his finger-tips pressed to his chest, in what I call his 'penitential' attitude, and he began a long tale, plaintive and rather vague, about his loneliness, the sadness of his life, the suffering he experiences from the slanders of others. He said that George Eliot was hounding on her myrmidons to his destruction. I made out that this referred to some attack in a newspaper which he supposes, very groundlessly I expect, to be inspired by George Eliot. Swinburne said that a little while ago he found his intellectual energy succumbing under a morbid distress at his isolation, and that he had been obliged steadily to review before his conscience his imaginative life in order to prevent himself from sinking into despair. This is only a mood, to be sure; but if there be any people who think so ill of him, I only wish they could see him as we see him at these recuperative intervals. Whatever he may be elsewhere, in our household not a kinder, simpler, or more affectionate creature could be desired as a visitor. The only fault we find with him is that his little mournful ways and his fragility drag painfully upon our sympathy."

This, it will be admitted, is not the Swinburne of legend in the 'seventies, and that it is so different may be judged, I hope, my excuse for recording it. A very sensible further change came over him when he was attacked by deafness, an infirmity to which, I believe, most members of his family have been liable. I do not think that I noticed any hardness of hearing until 1880, when the affliction rapidly developed. He was, naturally, very much concerned at it, and in the summer of that year he said to a lady of my household, "If this gets worse I shall become wholly unfit to mix in any society where two or three are gathered together." It did get worse; it was constitutional and incurable, and for

the last quarter of a century of his life he was almost impervious to outward sound. All the more, therefore, was he dependent on the care of the devoted friend who thenceforward guarded him so tenderly.

II.

The conversation of Swinburne, in the days of his youth and power, was very splendid in quality. No part of a great man disappears so completely as his table-talk, and to nothing is it more difficult afterwards to reconstruct an impression. Swinburne's conversation had, as was to be expected, some of the characteristics of his poetry. It was rapid, and yet not voluble; it was measured, ornate, and picturesque, and yet it was in a sense homely. It was much less stilted and involved than his prose writing. His extreme natural politeness was always apparent in his talk, unless, of course, some unfortunate contretemps should rouse a sudden ebullition, when he could be neither just nor kind. But, as a rule, his courtesy shone out of his blue-gray eyes and was lighted up by the halo of his cloud of orange hair as he waved it, gravely or waggishly, at the company. The ease with which finished and polished sentences flowed from him was a constant amazement to me. I noted (January, 1875) that somebody having been so unwise as to speak of the "laborious" versification of Catullus, Swinburne burst forth with a trumpetnote of scorn, and said, "Well, I can only tell you I should have called him the least laborious, and the most spontaneous, in his god-like and bird-like melody, of all the lyrists known to me except Sappho and Shelley; I should as soon call a lark's note 'labored' as Catullus'." This might have been said of Swinburne's amazing talk; it was a stream of song, no more labored than a lark's.

Immediately after leaving him I

used sometimes, as well as I could, to note down a few of his sentences. It was not easy to retain much where all was so copious and rich, but a whole phrase or even colloquy would linger long in the memory. I think these brief reports may be trusted to give his exact words; nothing could recall his accent and the spontaneous crescendo effect of his enthusiasm. I quote from my note-books almost at random. This is in 1875, about some literary autagonist, but I have neglected to note whom :

"He had better be careful. If I am obliged" [very slowly] "to take the cudgel in my hand" [in rapid exultation] "the rafters of the hovel in which he skulks and sniggers shall ring with the loudest whacks ever administered in discipline or chastisement to a howling churl." All this poured forth, in towering high spirits, without a moment's pause to find a word.

Often Swinburne would put on the ironical stop, and, with a killing air of mock modesty, would say, "I don't know whether you can reasonably expect me to be very much weaker than a tame rabbit"; or, "Even milk would boil over twice to be treated in that way."

He was certainly, during the years in which I knew him well, at his best in 1875. Many of the finest things which I tried to capture belonged to that year. Here is an instance of his

proud humility:—

"It is always a thorn in my flesh, and a check to any satisfaction which I might feel in writing prose, to reflect that probably I have never written, nor shall ever write, one single page that Landor would have deigned to sign. Nothing of this sort, or indeed of any sort whatever, troubles me for a moment when writing verse, but this always does haunt me when I am at work on prose."

In 1875 he had become considerably

severed from Rossetti in sympathy, and he was prepared to discuss without anger the possibility that his praise had been over-luscious:

"Well, very likely I did say some extravagant things about Rossetti's original sonnets and lyrics, but I do deliberately stick to any word I said about him as a translator. No doubt Shelley is to the full as beautiful a workman in that line, but then he is as inaccurate as Rossetti is accurate."

All through this year, 1875, his mind was full of the idea of translating Eschylus, Aristophanes, Villon, all his peculiar foreign favorites, and the subject was frequently uppermost in his mouth. He thought Mallarmé's version of Poe "very exquisite," although he could not make much of Manet's amazing folio illustrations. Swinburne was well disposed, however, to Manet, whose studio in Paris he told me he had visited in 1863, in company with Whistler and Fantin. He was much disappointed at the sudden death of Maggi, of Milan, who had undertaken to bring out a complete Italian translation of his poems. Swinburne used to speak of Italy as "my second mother-country" and "my country by adoption," although I think his only personal knowledge of it had been gained in 1863, when he spent a long time in and near Florence, much of the time in the society of Walter Savage Landor and that "dear, brilliant, ingenious creature," Mrs. Gaskell. was in a garden at Fiesole, he told me, with the whole air vociferous with nightingales, that he wrote "Itylus."

It

In the summer of 1875 I brought him a very laudatory review of his writings which had just appeared in Copenhagen, and urged him to gratify the Danish critic by sending him a few written words of acknowledgment. This he was very well pleased to do, but he paused, with lifted pen, and looking up sideways with that curious

roguish smile which was one of his charms, he asked, "But what in the name of all the gods and little fishes of Scandinavia am I to say? I know! I must borrow some of the divine daring which enables our Master to respond so frankly to tributes of which he cannot read a word! I will write to your Danish friend exactly as Victor Hugo replies to tributes of English verse and prose."

The first letter, he told me, which he received from Victor Hugo, of whom he always spoke in terms of idolatrous reverence, was in the early part of 1862, in acknowledgement of some unsigned articles on Les Misérables. In replying, with the greatest effusion, Swinburne asked leave to lay the dedication of "Chastelard" at Hugo's feet. Although the English poet always spoke of the French poet as a daughter might speak of her mother, with tender adoration, they did not meet until November, 1882, when Swinburne went over to Paris on purpose to attend the revival-"the resurrection," he called it-of Le Roi s'amuse. Не had no longer any familiarity with Paris; he stayed, like a true British tourist, in one of the fashionable hotels, in the Rue St. Honoré. On that occasion, and I think for the only time in his life, he pressed the hand of Victor Hugo. He wrote to me from Paris of the play, and of the fiftieth anniversary of its appearance, "a thing as unique and wonderful as the play itself," but said not a word of his impressions of Hugo.

To someone who remarked that it was disagreeable to be controverted, Swinburne replied gravely, "No! not at all! It gives a zest to the expression of sympathy to raise some points of amicable disagreement." This was not the only case in which I was struck by a certain unconscious resemblance between his repartees and those of Dr. Johnson.

In 1873 or 1874 he started his theory of the division of great writers into gods and giants. He worked it out rather whimsically; Shakespeare, of course, was a god, and Ben Jonson was a giant, but I think that Webster was a god. These conjectures led him along the pleasant pathway of caprice. He now started his serious study of Shakespeare, of which, as about to become a book, I believe he first spoke to me late in 1873. It was a time of controversy SO acrid that we can hardly realize the bitterness of it in these calm days. But Swinburne was more than ready for the fight. He rejoiced in his power to make his assailants ridiculous. "I need hardly tell you," he said to me, "that I shall begin, and clear my way, with a massacre of the pedants worthy of one of Topsy's [William Morris's] Icelandic sagas. It shall be 'a murder grim and great,' I pledge myself to you!" And indeed he was very vivacious at the expense of the New Shakespeare (or "Shack-spur," as he always pronounced it) Society.

Great anger burned in his bosom because the "Athenæum" described his Erechtheus as "a translation from Euripides." I never clearly understood the reason of Swinburne's fanatical objection to Euripides, which has even puzzled Dr. Verrall. On the occasion of

the appearance of the review quoted above, I found Swinburne in a fine fit of the tantrums. He poured out his indignation the moment I came into the room. "Translation from Euripides, indeed! Why, a fourth-form boy could perceive that, as far as Erechtheus can be said to be formed after anybody, it is modelled throughout on the earlier style of Eschylus, the simple three-part epic style of "The Suppliants,' The Persians,' and the 'Seven against Thebes,' the style most radically contrary to the 'droppings,' grrh! the droppings (as our divine and

aptly

I

dearest Mrs. Browning SO rather than delicately puts it) of the scenic sophist that can be conceived. should very much like to see the play of Euripides which contains five hundred consecutive lines that could be set against as many of mine!"

Again, on a later occasion, "I always have maintained, and I always shall maintain, that it is infinitely easier to over-top Euripides by the head and shoulders than to come up to the waist of Sophocles or stretch up to touch the lance of Æschylus." Erechtheus was written with unusual celerity, all of it, if I remember right, in lodgings by the sea at Wragford, near Southwold, in Suffolk, where Swinburne was staying in the autumn of 1875. When we think of the learning, the weight of imagination, and the unrivalled metrical daring of that splendid drama (to my mind on the very highest level of Swinburne's poetical achievement), this improvisation seems marvellous.

To one who praised in his presence the two great naval odes of Campbell: "I like to hear you say that. But I should speak still more passionately, for the simple fact is that I know nothing like them at all, simile aut secundum, in their own line, which is one of the very highest lines in the highest range of poetry. Very little national verse anywhere is good either patriotically or poetically; and what is good patriotically is far inferior to Campbell poetically. Look at Burns and Rouget de l'Isle! What is virtually lacking is proof, in the face of the Philistines, that poetry has real worth and weight in national matters-lacking everywhere else, only-not lacking in Campbell."