reader is the feeling by which the poet was moved to write it, a delight in the music and vague associations of such words as pleasure and pain, remember and forget, and in the triumphant art that can seem to kindle passion by their mere juxtaposition. No doubt Mr. Swinburne felt sad when he wrote such poems, but it was the luxurious causeless sadness of youth casting about for imaginary themes and situations through which to express itself. Sometimes the themes chosen had little or no connection with the emotion to be expressed through them, as in most of the poems which were considered shocking when the book was first published. The professed theme of "Dolores," for instance, is not one that poetry could really be made out of. There are no such things as "the roses and raptures of vice." One might as well talk about the roses and raptures of lying. In "Dolores" Mr. Swinburne has too much artistic tact ever to come to close quarters with his subject. Sometimes he exercises his ingenuity, like an eighteenth century poet, in poetic allusions to things with which poetry has no concern; but most of the poem is made up of viclent digressions. Any hint is enough to tempt him away from the subject which he is sworn to pursue with such desperate audacity.

"Out of Dindymus heavily laden

Her lions draw bound and unfed A mother, a mortal, a maiden,

A Queen over death and the dead. She is cold, and her habit is lowly, Her temple of branches and sods; Most fruitful and virginal, holy, A mother of Gods.

That is one of the beautiful digressions which make "Dolores" a poem. The most scandalous verses in it are the poorest. The raptures expressed

in it are not those of vice, but of the rebellion of youth which sees no rea

son why it should submit to the experience of ages. In that poem and in many others Mr. Swinburne kicks up his heels like a young colt and crows with the exultant naughtiness of an infant. There never was more inarticulate poetry. The power and beauty of genius are working fiercely in it, and can only express themselves in the sound and rhythm of the words. "Dolores" is not a great poem, some of it is positively bad; but only a man of genius could have written it at an age when he had not yet learnt to find satisfaction in the real and the particular, and had acquired no experience and no moral convictions to provide him with subjects fitted to his art. At such an age genius is peculiarly apt to make a romance out of wickedness or what it takes to be wickedness. Byron, enchanted by the East, supposed himself to be enchanted by its crimes, and cast the spell of his delusion over half the youth of Europe. Mr. Swinburne, enchanted by Paganism, supposed that the legendary vices associated with it were the essence of the enchantment. He was possessed of a delight in power, no matter how maleficent, provided it manifested itself in some kind of unfamiliar and tumultuous beauty. His fancy was taken by a vision of Bacchic revels under the stars, of breathless dances and clashing music in dark Thracian forests. He expressed it all more clearly in the retrospect of a wonderful verse in the prelude to "Songs before Sunrise."

We too have tracked by star-proofed trees

The tempest of the Thyiades,
Scared the loud night on hills that hid
The blood feast of the Bassarid,
Heard their song's iron cadences
Fright the wolf hungering from the
kid,

Outroar the lion-throated seas,
Outchide the north wind if it chid,

And hush the torrent-tongued ravines With thunders of their tambourines.

There is a poetry of Apollo sung by the great Olympian poets, who see reality as beauty, and a poetry of Pan, liquid, artless, unaccountable, sung by the poets who have never lost their childhood. Mr. Swinburne has sung the poetry of Dionysus, heady bewildered, full of revolt from reality and of a beauty that exhausts itself in furious sound and motion, and in the effort to express it knows not what. Some of it was intended to be shocking, and many grave persons obliged the poet at once with exclamations of horror and indignation. Whatever was written with that intention betrays itself at once by its badness, for mere naughtiness will not make great verses; but it is nearly all possessed by a rapture that transfigures even its faults. Mr. Swinburne has been called a decadent writer, but occasional perversities are no proof of decadence. The rapture of his poetry is common in the music even of the greatest composers. Indeed, he expressed in poetry the very moods, and almost produced the very effects, of music, at a time when poets were becoming too timid or too much burdened with thought to surrender themselves to the pure delight of their art. The dazzling novelty of his versification was only the expression of a state of mind rare in our time. While other poets were arguing themselves in verse into a conviction that life was glorious, he expressed the glory of life in the very music and rhythm of his lines and in the very words which uttered a desire for death. His poetry seems to be, not a memory of experience or a statement of conclusions drawn from it, but the immediate expression of life itself uttered in the very moment of living. He seems to break out into poetry as a man starting for a walk on

the morning of a fine summer's day may break into singing. He inspires the reader with the glorious mood. which set him singing, of all kinds of irrelevant things perhaps, but the mood sounds through the irrelevancies.

The wind is as iron that rings,

The foam-heads loosen and flee;: It swells and welters and swings, The pulse of the tide of the sea.

And up on the yellow cliff

The long corn flickers and shakes; Push, for the wind holds stiff,

And the gunwale dips and rakes.

Good hap to the fresh fierce weather,
The quiver and beat of the sea!
While three men hold together,
The kingdoms are less by three.

These are verses from what is intended to be a fierce revolutionary song; what they really express is that passion for the sea which lies deeper in Mr. Swinburne's mind than any political creed. His own poetry has something of the beauty of great waters that he loves so well. It is all fluid and unbounded, swaying magnificently hither and thither, full of a power that delights in nothing so much as its own motion, and beats wildly against the most permanent beliefs and laws of man in a kind of harmless riot, breaking into new fantastic splendor as it assaults them. Compared with it the poetry of such men as Milton and Wordsworth has the stability of things of the land, slow of growth, orderly in structure, and fixed in form.

Writing of "Poems and Ballads" alone one may make this comparison without many qualifications. But there is a common belief that Mr. Swinburne never developed past his brilliant youth, that he was born an incomparable master of the sensuous elements of poetry, and learnt nothing from experience to extend that mas

tery. Many masterpieces of his later years refute that belief, but this is not the occasion to speak of them. Yet there are passages even in "Poems and Ballads" which prove that already when he chose he could comment upon life with point and force. The Ode to Victor Hugo, the first and perhaps the best of many, has some of the weight of thought we expect to find in that highest form of lyric poetry. Passages like the following show that among his youthful perversities and rebellions he The London Times.

had begun to admire the great heroic things which have since inspired him to some of the most splendid verse in our language:

Yet though all this be thus, Be those men praised of us Who have loved and wrought and sorrowed and not sinned

For fame or fear or gold, Nor waxed for winter cold, Nor changed for changes of the worldly wind.

It is said that the operatives of some of the Lancashire towns have recently been seized with a mania for keeping tame larks. These they take out into the fields in cages on Saturdays and Sundays, and combine the joys of sport with those of sentiment and sweet sounds by holding matches in which the lark that sings longest is the victor. The taste seems to be cosmopolitan, for the author of "Life and Sport in China" notes that the Chinese of Pekin commonly take out tame larks to sing to them on holiday afternoons. The Chinaman carries his bird's cage on the hand bent back and upraised to the shoulder, as a German waiter carries dishes. Arrived at some suitable spot, he puts the cage on the ground, retires some distance, and whistles to the bird, which then begins to sing, listened to by an appreciative audience of Celestial connoisseurs who gather round to enjoy the treat.

But whatever the pleasure given to dwellers in towns by listening to their song, it cannot be deemed otherwise than cruel to keep larks in cages, especially in the wretched little boxes to which the fashion of birdsellers con

demns them. The skylark is a singer by nature, and is perhaps one of the most joyous and irrepressibly happy of all birds, until the winter of its discontent sets in with the frost, when its nature changes entirely, and its ecstatic soaring flight and song are exchanged for a low and hungry "trek” from stubble to stubble, and a piping and complaining cry. Even so, the larks will continue to soar and sing, whenever the weather is bright and genial, far into the early winter; and on some exceptionally warm days during last November, when a vast area of late charlock was still in flower and scenting the air, the foreign larks, fresh arrivals on migration from the North, were soaring and singing in hundreds. In spring nothing seems to deter them from their aerial climb, and. they are by no means averse to nesting, soaring, and singing even among the bricks and mortar of great cities. Wherever there are portions of waste ground covered with grass among the London suburbs, the larks nest and soar and sing as gaily as over the primeval turf of Salisbury Plain or the Great White Horse.

For its music alone the song of the lark is almost the most melodious of

any bird's. The tone and quality are admirable, and the volume of sound astonishing. It can be heard clearly when the lark has mounted, as it sometimes does, beyond recognition by normal eyesight. The volume of

sound is also most noticeable when a caged lark is heard, singing as it does far nearer to the hearer than the bird in the sky. But apart from the quality and music of the song, the circumstances in which it is uttered, render it an astonishing feat. Every other considerable songster is quite aware that singing entails much physical effort. Consequently it takes care to secure a good platform to sing from. A thrush or a blackbird or a robin nearly always selects a top shoot, or projecting bough, preferably a dead one, on which it sits and sings, never moving its position, and without any objects round it to hinder the "carry" of its voice. The blackcap and nightingale and some of the warblers, sit in a bush to sing; but the whitethroat, and even the hedgesparrow, choose the topmost twig. The whitethroat sometimes sings when descending, and some of the pipits and the woodlark do the same, the meadowpipit singing a feeble little song as it makes a short ascent and descent. But to the strain on its lungs of long-protracted song the lark adds the great muscular exertion of a steady upward flight, usually carried out, not by scaling the air in gentle circles, as in the soaring of the larger birds, but by a vertical climb made by the incessant beating of its wings. Wordsworth's recognition of it as the

Type of the wise who soar, but never

roam;

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

is often almost literally correct. After two or three spirals, the bird goes up

almost as if it were drawn heavenwards by a cord, and then, closing its wings, descends like a falling stone to the very point from which it rose. The strain upon the muscles and the lungs would be great if during all this time it were silent. But it chooses to add to the exertion of soaring that of pouring forth a continuous flood of sweet notes, with no intermissions or breaks whatever, A lark will soar and sing during a space of ten minutes consecutively. The rapidity with which the pectoral muscles are working during this period may be judged from the fact that the bird makes not less than from five to six beats of the wing per second. The beats are usually in sets of from three to five, the bird pausing for a moment as if to take a fresh start after the interval. When chased by the merlin falcon, skylarks make their finest exhibitions of flight, ascending into the air to heights which have been estimated as being not less than a thousand feet. Sometimes the bird uses the same means of ascent as when it is soaring and singing, rising vertically by incessant beats of the wing. In the language of the falconer, these are termed "mounting" larks, and their object is to outfly the hawk directly, shaking off its pursuit during the ascent. Others prefer to rise by flying in a spiral, which the falcon imitates. Mr. E. B. Michell in his volume on "The Art and Practice of Hawking" says: "The one bird may be circling from right to left and the other from left to right, and neither seems to guide the direction of its rings by any reference to those which the other is making. It is now a struggle to see which can get up fastest, and it is astonishing to see to what a height such flights will sometimes reach. As soon as a lark is eight hundred feet high it can drop, almost like a stone, into any cover within a radius of two hundred yards from the spot just under it, al

lowance being made for the effect of wind. But eight hundred feet is not high for a ringing flight, at least there is nothing unusual about it. A lark does not go out of sight till he is much above that height, and it is no extraordinary thing for it to do this." The lark seldom sings late in the day. It can be tempted to rise in a burst of melody for one final ascent if the evening sun breaks through the clouds after rain. But as a rule it is silent long before the sun has descended into the Western bed of cloud. We have Milton's authority that it is up and in song before dawn. But those who have

Heard the lark begin its flight, And singing startle the dull night—

are not easily found, though in the height of the pairing-time it may very possibly be beforehand with Aurora in greeting its mate. But as a rule the lark sings at sunrise, as the ortolan eats. Darkness depresses it and keeps it mute, but a gleam of sun is the signal for it to ascend. Obviously rain would make it most difficult for it to soar, both by adding to the weight of its body from the moisture caught in the feathers, and by wetting the webs of the pinions, so the lark only soars in the dry as a rule. It is one of the most sensitive and best of Nature's weather-gages, for when the larks begin to sing it is almost certain that rain has ceased for some time, if not for the day. It is the cock lark which sings. William Cobbett noted that one was just soaring and beginning to sing when the hen flew up, and evidently told him to stop, for she fetched him down again,-"an instance," says Cobbett, "of that petticoat government" which is universal.

Skylarks are rather prolific birds, having two broods in the year, and often laying as many as five eggs, though four is the usual number. The nest is so difficult to find that it is

practically never discovered except by accident, as when, for instance, the hayfields are mown, or wheat is being hoed. The bird very seldom nests near to the margin of a field, where it might be put off its nest by passersby. On the shores of the North Sea skylarks will nest in the "bents" and "marram" close to the edge of the sandhills, though they have to fetch food to their young from a considerable distance. There is always something very pleasing in the sight of a lark's nest. It is usually sunk in a hollow, and unlike the nests of many ground-building birds, is most carefully made, the cup being deep and perfectly circular, and lined with very fine grasses, though the outer part is made of rough, dead bents, and often of a most irregular shape, in order to fill up the hole in which it is made.

In winter the rain-soaked fields of England, and the great area of young corn, to the blades of which larks are very partial, attract enormous numbers of these birds from the North of Europe. The numbers of migratory larks reported from the East Coast lighthouses exceed those of any other species. They have not only the taste, but even the smell, of game-birds, for young dogs always incline to point them. They have been eaten from time immemorial by Englishmen, who, unlike Continentals, eat no other small birds. The French naturalist's note that "this exquisite songster is delicious on toast" may be paralleled from an English book called "Hunger's Prevention; or, The Art of Fowling," published in 1621, the author of which gives details of an ingenious device, still used on the Continent, for decoying larks by means of revolving mirrors. It is on record that fifteen thousand larks were caught in one night upon Heligoland. English bird-lovers may console themselves with the knowledge that the larks eaten are mainly