Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 6, 2025
Those two are enough for the infinite variety, the epic, the drama, the lyric, of our poetry. It is, accordingly, in these old traditional and proved metres that Swinburne's music seems to me most worthy, most controlled, and most lovely. There is his best dignity, and therefore his best beauty.
It is true that the poet repudiates a religion that humbles him; this is one of the strongest reasons for his pantheistic leanings. There is no God, O son! Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter of religious humility.
To the end of his life he never listened to a French recitation with pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty in French verse; but he did not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for Alfred de Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; de Musset was unequal; he did not sustain himself on the wing.
It is in the same boar hunt: And fiery with invasive eyes, And bristling with intolerable hair, Plunged; Sometimes we may be troubled with a misgiving that Swinburne's fine narrative, as well as his descriptive writing of other kinds, has a counterpart in the programme-music of some now bygone composers.
In 1806 Dr. Mitford takes his daughter, who was then about nineteen, to the North to visit his relations; they are entertained by the grandparents of the Trevelyans and the Swinburnes, the Ogles and the Mitfords of the present day. They fish in Sir John Swinburne's lake, they visit at Alnwick Castle.
Then, too, he very much enjoyed his article on "Bad Lighting in Coalchester," with its evident allegoric insinuation that Coalchester needed lighting in more ways than one, and that "The Dawn" was prepared to undertake, free of charge, the top-lighting of which it was most in need. James Whalley contributed a review of "Mr. Swinburne's new Poems," through which article Mr.
Swinburne's, who occasionally holds his nose with one hand while he waves the censer with the other. Humanity be hanged! Men of inferior genius, Victor Hugo and Mr. Gladstone, take refuge in it. Humanity is a pigsty, where liars, hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate; it has been so since the great Jew conceived it, and it will be so till the end.
Stevenson was fond of "our auld ally of France," to whom our country and our exiled kings owed so much. I rather vaguely remember another anecdote. He missed his train from Edinburgh to London, and his sole portable property was a return ticket, a meerschaum pipe, and a volume of Mr. Swinburne's poems.
Ten people will be bored by an argument as to the nature of Swinburne's genius for one who will be bored by an argument as to the nature of Swinburne's submissiveness to Watts-Dunton. Was Watts-Dunton, in a phrase deprecated by the editors of a recent book of letters, a "kind of amiable Svengali"? Did he allow Swinburne to have a will of his own? Did Swinburne, in going to Putney, go to the Devil?
O'Brien had taken two good prizes, and that was sufficient to cover a multitude of sins, even if he had committed any; but the despatch was admirably written, and the admiral, in his letter to the Admiralty, commented upon Captain O'Brien's successful and daring attack; whereas, if the truth had been known, it was Swinburne's advice of pulling up the weather shore, which was the occasion of our capturing the Victorine; but it was very hard to come at the real truth of these sort of things, as I found out during the time that I was in His Majesty's service.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking