Nor strong sweet shape of the full-breasted noon;
But where the silver-sandalled shadows are,
Too soft for arrows of the sun to mar,
Moves with the mild gait of an ungrown moon.

Even more valuable than this exquisite rhymed stanza is the blank verse
which Swinburne released into new energies, new liberties, and new
movements. Milton, it need hardly be said, is the master of those who
know how to place and displace the stress and accent of the English
heroic line in epic poetry. His most majestic hand undid the mechanical
bonds of the national line and made it obey the unwritten laws of his
genius. His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and charges. It feels
the strain, it yields, it resists; it is all-expressive. But if the
practice of some of the poets succeeding him had tended to make it rigid
and tame again, Swinburne was a new liberator. He writes, when he ought,
with a finely appropriate regularity, as in the lovely line on the forest
glades

That fear the faun's and know the dryad's foot,

in which the rule is completely kept, every step of the five stepping
from the unaccented place to the accented without a tremor. (I must
again protest that I use the word "accent" in a sense that has come to be
adapted to English prosody, because it is so used by all writers on
English metre, and is therefore understood by the reader, but I think
"stress" the better word.) But having written this perfect
English-iambic line so wonderfully fit for the sensitive quiet of the
woods, he turns the page to the onslaught of such lines--heroic lines
with a difference--as report the short-breathed messenger's reply to
Althea's question by whose hands the boar of Calydon had died: