IN recalling Swinburne's early poems we are apt to think
first of Atalanta in Calydon; but the first series of "Poems
and Ballads" is a better guide to the influences that equipped
him at the opening of his career. In this lyric book of the
genius and the extravagance of youth, we have a curious
instance of what may come of a young poet's reading the old
poetry, classic and medieval, not in an academic, but in a new,
perfervid way. Its strange music forcibly broke with the
accepted method; for the new-comer felt it a reproach that,
as he said in Dolores--

"Old poets outsing and outlove us,
And Catullus makes mouths at our speech."

The most marked poem in the book, the Laus Veneris, offered
a new setting of the ancient fable, which was intensely sensual,
yet intensely imaginative. The pride of deadly sin sus-
tained to perdition, the knight's tragedy, the winter's interlude,
provide colours curiously and wonderfully wrought into the
tapestry--