Haystack in the Floods," with its tragedy, must surely appeal to all who
read poetry.

For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr. Morris's
long later poems, "The Earthly Paradise" especially, were less art than
"art manufacture." This may be an ungrateful and erroneous sentiment.
"The Earthly Paradise," and still more certainly "Jason," are full of
such pleasure as only poetry can give. As some one said of a
contemporary politician, they are "good, but copious." Even from
narrative poetry Mr. Morris has long abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr.
Matthew Arnold's parable of "The Progress of Poetry."

"The Mount is mute, the channel dry."

Euripides has been called "the meteoric poet," and the same title seems
very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his
name--I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in
prose--when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" in 1865. I remember
taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford Union, and being
instantly led captive by the beauty and originality of the verse.

There was this novel "meteoric" character in the poem: the writer seemed
to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, "the blue cold fields
and folds of air," in all the primitive forces which were alive before
this earth was; the naked vast powers that circle the planets and
farthest constellations. This quality, and his varied and sonorous
verse, and his pessimism, put into the mouth of a Greek chorus, were the
things that struck one most in Mr. Swinburne. He was, above all, "a
mighty-mouthed inventer of harmonies," and one looked eagerly for his
next poems. They came with disappointment and trouble.