"Amorous languishments, luminous trances,
Sights which are not seen with eyes,
Spiritual and soul-piercing glances;
Whose pure and subtle lightning flies
Home to the heart, and sets the house on fire;
And melts it down in sweet desire:
Yet doth not stay
To ask the windows leave to pass that way.
"Delicious deaths, soft exhalations
Of soul! dear and divine annihilations!
A thousand unknown rites
Of joys and rarified delights!"
This might have been pardonable in a Roman Catholic of Selden's time, but the echo of it in a "mature" person of the nineteenth century is positively dreadful.[1]
I close this book of the "mature" person. I close Mr. Swinburne's volumes. I try to gather some definite impression, some thought, some light, from what I have been reading. I find my mind jaded, my whole body sick and distressed, a dull pain lurking in the region of the medulla oblongata. I try to picture up Mr. Rossetti's poetry, and I am dazzled by conceits in sixteenth-century costume,—"rosy
- ↑ Hall, in the ninth satire of Book I., took occasion to attack this blending of incongruous ideas and symbols into affected religious verse. "Hence, ye profane!" he cried,
"—mell not with holy things,
That Sion's Muse from Palestina brings.
Parnassus is transformed to Sion Hill,
And iv'ry-palms her steep ascents done fill,
Now good St. Peter weeps pure Helicon,
And both the Maries make a music moan;
Yea, even the prophet of the heav'nly lyre,
Great Solomon, sings in the English quire,
And is become a new-found sonnetist,
Singing his love, the holy spouse of Christ,
Like as she were some light-skirts of the rest," &c.
