admiration for all things French, no tourist's politics in Italy--and
Swinburne's French and Italian admirations have the tourist manner of
enthusiasm--prompts him here. Here he aspires to brotherhood with the
supreme poets of supreme England, with the sixteenth century, the
seventeenth, and the nineteenth, the impassioned centuries of song. Happy
is he to be admitted among these, happy is he to merit by his wonderful
voice to sing their raptures. Here is no humiliation in ready-made
lendings; their ecstasy becomes him. He is glorious with them, and we
can imagine this benign and indulgent Nature confounding together the
sons she embraces, and making her poets--the primary and the secondary,
the greater and the lesser--all equals in her arms. Let us see him in
that company where he looks noble amongst the noble; let us not look upon
him in the company of the ignoble, where he looks ignobler still, being
servile to them; let us look upon him with the lyrical Shakespeare, with
Vaughan, Blake, Wordsworth, Patmore, Meredith; not with Baudelaire and
Gautier; with the poets of the forest and the sun, and not with those of
the alcove. We can make peace with him for love of them; we can imagine
them thankful to him who, poor and perverse in thought in so many pages,
could yet join them in such a song as this:

And her heart sprang in Iseult, and she drew
With all her spirit and life the sunrise through,
And through her lips the keen triumphant air
Sea-scented, sweeter than land-roses were,
And through her eyes the whole rejoicing east
Sun-satisfied, and all the heaven at feast
Spread for the morning; and the imperious mirth
Of wind and light that moved upon the earth,
Making the spring, and all the fruitful might
And strong regeneration of delight