Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/110

all, and worst imaginable instance of perversion—could be hoped of any new attempt? But here the divine verse seems actually to fall of itself into a new mould, the exact shape and size of the first—to be poured from one cup into another without spilling one drop of nectar. Nay, so far beyond other men's is this poet's power of transfusion that as though to confute the Italian proverb against the treasons of translators he has wellnigh achieved the glory of reproducing a few lines even of Sappho, by welding two fragments into one song, melting two notes into one chord of verse. But though the sweet life and colour be saved and renewed, no man can give again in full that ineffable glory and grace as of present godhead, that subtle breath and bloom of very heaven itself, that dignity of divinity which informs the most passionate and piteous notes of the unapproachable poetess with such grandeur as would seem impossible to such passion. Here is a delicious and living music, but here is not—what can nowhere be—the echo of that unimaginable song, with its pauses and redoubled notes and returns and falls of sound, as of honey dropping from heaven—as of tears, and fire, and seed of life—which though but run over and repeated in thought pervades the spirit with "a sweet possessive pang." That apple "atop on the topmost twig" of the tree of life and song remains unreachable by any second hand, untastable by any later lip for ever; never out of sight of men's memory, never within grasp of man's desire; the apple which not Paris but Apollo gave to her whose glory has outlived her goddess, and whose name has been set above hers:—