Swinburne, says Mr. Gosse, “was not quite like a human being.”  That is chiefly what is the matter with his poetry.  He did not write quite like a human being.  He wrote like a musical instrument.  There are few poets whose work is less expressive of personal passions.  He was much given to ecstasies, but it is remarkable that most of these were echoes of other people’s ecstasies.  He sought after rapture both in politics and poetry, and he took as his masters Mazzini in the one and Victor Hugo in the other.  He has been described as one who, while conversing, even in his later years, kept “bobbing all the while like a cork on the sea of his enthusiasms.”  And, in a great deal of his rapture, there is much of the levity as well as the “bobbing” quality of the cork.  He who sang the hymns of the Republic in his youth, ended his life as rhetorician-in-chief of the Jingoes against the Irish and the Boers.  Nor does one feel that there was any philosophic basis for the change in his attitude as there was for a similar change in the attitude of Burke and Wordsworth in their later years.  He was influenced more by persons than by principles.  One does not find any real vision of a Republic in his work as one finds it in the work of Shelley.  He had little of the saintliness of spirit which marks the true Republican and which turns politics into music in The Masque of Anarchy.  His was not one of those tortured souls, like Francis Adams’s, which desire the pulling-down of the pillars of the old, bad world more than love or fame.  There is no utterance of the spirit in such lines as:—­

    Let our flag run out straight in the wind! 
      The old red shall be floated again
    When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned,
      When the names that are twenty are ten;

    When the devil’s riddle is mastered
      And the galley-bench creaks with a Pope,
    We shall see Buonaparte the bastard
      Kick heels with his throat in a rope.

It is possible for those who agree with the sentiments to derive a certain satisfaction from verse of this sort as from a vehement leading article.  But there is nothing here beyond the rhetoric of the hot fit.  There is nothing to call back the hot fit in anybody older than a boy.

Even when Swinburne was writing out of his personal experience, he contrived somehow to empty his verse of personality and to put sentimentalism and rhetoric in its place.  We have an instance of this in the story of the love-affair recorded by Mr. Gosse.  Swinburne, at the age of twenty-five, fell in love with a kinswoman of Sir John Simon, the pathologist.  “She gave him roses, she played and sang to him, and he conceived from her gracious ways an encouragement which she was far from seriously intending.”  Swinburne proposed to her, and, possibly from nervousness, she burst out laughing.  He was only human in feeling bitterly offended, and “they parted on the worst