Northumbrian coast, when its writer, not long escaped from
Oxford, was on a visit to the Bell Scotts.

These years of his emergence were pitched in a time of
many agitations, a time when some signs of revolution were
to be counted. Ruskin was, in his own way, a herald of its
advance; and many things that look innocent enough now,
appeared ominous then. In prose fiction, works unconven-
tional as Charles Reade Griffith Gaunt, and Hugo Travailleurs
de la Mer, were carrying new ideas afield; and George Meredith
Vittoria was running in the Fortnightly Review. Still more
notable, Browning Dramatis Personœ had appeared in 1864,
and that strenuous verseman, Robert Buchanan, then regarded
as potential in the art, issued his London Poems in 1866. In
science, Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer were
revolutionaries. With Ruskin and Jowett at Oxford; William
Morris writing his Earthly Paradise and working his way to his
protest against an order of life where paradise was impossible;
Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Millais, Madox-Brown, Holman Hunt
bringing romance into art: one realises how full of new ideas
were those days of the early sixties.

Any attempt made to trace the influences that gave Swin-
burne his early colours and rhythms must take stock of his
Oxford associations with D. G. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and
William Morris. There is an equivalent in poetry to the
early Pre-Raphaelite manner in painting; its worst and best
characteristics are alike seen in Chastelard and in the most
mannered pages of the Poems and Ballads. But when all is
said that can be said of the conceits in the one and the almost
angry sensuality in the other, there is so fine a residue, large
in melody and creative in phrase, that the attitude of the
critics who saw no merit in them is incomprehensible. What
one does see in these ballads, under the garb of the Pre-
Raphaelite and the Pre-Spenserite, is an almost barbaric force
allied to the tempestuous sincerity of the young visionary
who thinks to startle dull morality by revealing the naked
passions. In all this earlier verse it is lyric force that first
strikes one when estimating its comparative value. He could

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