prestidigitation, and conjuring of words, to transformations and
transmutations of sound--if, I say, his extraordinary gift of diction
brought him to this exaggeration of the manner, what a part does it not
play in the matter of his poetry! So overweening a place does it take in
this man's art that I believe the words to hold and use his meaning,
rather than the meaning to compass and grasp and use the word. I believe
that Swinburne's thoughts have their source, their home, their origin,
their authority and mission in those two places--his own vocabulary and
the passion of other men. This is a grave charge.

First, then, in regard to the passion of other men. I have given to his
own emotion the puniest name I could find for it; I have no nobler name
for his intellect. But other men had thoughts, other men had passions;
political, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, rebellious,
agonising, imperial, republican, cruel, compassionate; and with these he
fed his verses. Upon these and their life he sustained, he fattened, he
enriched his poetry. Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in France,
Shelley in England, made for him a base of passionate and intellectual
supplies. With them he kept the all-necessary line of communication. We
cease, as we see their active hearts possess his active art, to think a
question as to his sincerity seriously worth asking; what sincerity he
has is so absorbed in the one excited act of receptivity. That, indeed,
he performs with all the will, all the precipitation, all the rush, all
the surrender, all the wholehearted weakness of his subservient and
impetuous nature. I have not named the Greeks, nor the English Bible,
nor Milton, as his inspirers. These he would claim; they are not his. He
received too partial, too fragmentary, too arbitrary an inheritance of
the Greek spirit, too illusory an idea of Milton, of the English Bible
little more than a tone;--this poet of eager, open capacity, this poet
who is little more, intellectually, than a too-ready, too-vacant