was still alive, I should have been as ready to imagine him living in
Putney as elsewhere. The marvel would have been merely that he lived.
And Swinburne's survival struck as surely as could his have struck in
me the chord of wonder.

Not, of course, that he had achieved a feat of longevity. He was far
from the Psalmist's limit. Nor was he one of those men whom one
associates with the era in which they happened to be young. Indeed, if
there was one man belonging less than any other to Mid-Victorian days,
Swinburne was that man. But by the calendar it was in those days that
he had blazed--blazed forth with so unexampled a suddenness of
splendour; and in the light of that conflagration all that he had
since done, much and magnificent though this was, paled. The essential
Swinburne was still the earliest. He was and would always be the
flammiferous boy of the dim past--a legendary creature, sole kin to
the phoenix. It had been impossible that he should ever surpass
himself in the artistry that was from the outset his; impossible that
he should bring forth rhythms lovelier and greater than those early
rhythms, or exercise over them a mastery more than--absolute. Also, it
had been impossible that the first wild ardour of spirit should abide
unsinkingly in him. Youth goes. And there was not in Swinburne that
basis on which a man may in his maturity so build as to make good, in
some degree, the loss of what is gone. He was not a thinker: his mind
rose ever away from reason to rhapsody; neither was he human. He was a
king crowned but not throned. He was a singing bird that could build
no nest. He was a youth who could not afford to age. Had he died
young, literature would have lost many glories; but none so great as
the glories he had already given, nor any such as we should fondly
imagine ourselves bereft of by his early death. A great part of Keats'
fame rests on our assumption of what he would have done. But--even