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
granting that Keats may have had in him more than had Swinburne of
stuff for development--I believe that had he lived on we should think
of him as author of the poems that in fact we know.
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