The Victorian Poets 155the Victorian epoch. Others who have not the same limitations,
either fall below him in art or have a less sustained and consid-
erable bulk and variety of work. Swinburne brings in into the
poetry of the time elements to which the rest are strangers. He
has a fire and passion and vehemence of song which is foreign
to their temperament. He brings in too the continental note of
denial, atheistic affirmation, sceptical revolt, passionate political
idealism, but to these things he gives the Anglo-Celtic aggres-
siveness and violence, not the Latin sureness and clarity. He is a
great lyrist, but like many of his contemporaries revels too much
in device and virtuosities of form and his lyrical thought and sen-
timent turn easily to the dithyrambic note, are marred by excess,
diffuseness, an inequality in the inspiration and the height and
tone. But he has especially in his earlier poetry done work of a
perfect and highly wrought beauty, a marvellous music. There
is often a captivatingly rich and sensuous appeal in his language
and not unoften it rises to a splendid magnificence.Atalanta
in Calydon,Dolores,Hertha,The Garden of Proserpineand
numerous other poems with the same perfect workmanship will
always stand among the consummate achievements of English
poetry. He is at his best one of the great lyrical singers; he writes
in a flood and sweep and passion of melody: he is unique as a
voice of all-round revolt, political, moral and of every kind, and
in this lies his main significance. But he exhausts himself too
soon; the reproach of emptiness can be brought against much of
his work and his later voice becomes empty of significance but
not of resonance. The quieter classical power of Arnold which
voices the less confident search of a self-doubting scepticism,
has lucidity, balance and grace, a fine though restricted and ten-
uous strain of thought and a deep and penetrating melancholy,
the mediaevalism and aesthetic mysticism of Rossetti, the slow
dreamy narrative of Morris which takes us to a refuge from
the blatancy and ugliness of the Victorian environment into the
gracious world of old story and legend, bring in each their own
significance for the age and help towards that enrichment of
the language of thought and artistic poetical feeling which is
the chief work of this intervening time. They have all three this