Page:Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1904).djvu/84

It had been a very sultry day, and with the advancing twilight, heavy thunder-clouds were rolling up. The door opened and Swinburne entered. He appeared in an abstracted state, and for a few minutes sat silent. Soon, something I had said anent his last poem set his thoughts loose. Like the storm that had just broken, so he began in low tones to utter lines of poetry. As the storm increased, he got more and more excited and carried away by the impulse of his thoughts, bursting into a torrent of splendid verse that seemed like some grand air with the distant peals of thunder as an intermittent accompaniment. And still the storm waxed more violent, and the vivid flashes of lightning became more frequent. But Swinburne seemed unconscious of it all, and whilst he paced up and down the room, pouring out bursts of passionate declamation, faint electric sparks played round the wavy masses of his luxuriant hair. I lay on the sofa in a corner of the studio and listened in wonder and with a curious awe, for it appeared to me as though the very figures in the pictures that were on the easels standing about the room were conscious of and sympathized with the poet and his outpourings. The Proserpine¹⁰¹ gazed out more mournfully than I had been wont to see her gaze; her longing to return to earth seemed to have Swinburne as an additional reason for it. On the other side looked out through her frame the Blessed Damozel,¹⁰² and "from the golden bar of heaven" Cassandra,¹⁰³ away in the farthermost part of the studio, peered through the