survivor who could share the earliest of these reminiscences, to the poet's venerable mother, now settled at Barking Hall, where, on the 19th of July 1896, Lady Jane Swinburne was welcomed on the morning of her eighty-seventh birthday by an ode in which her son enshrined his tenderness, his reverence, and his adoring affection. But on the 26th of November of that same year "the woods that watched her waking" beheld that gracious form no more. The grief of her son was overwhelming, and it may be said that this formed. the last crisis of his own life. From this moment he became even more gentle, more remote, more unupbraiding than ever. He went on gliding over the commons of Wimbledon with the old noiseless regularity, but it could hardly be said that he held a place any longer in the ordinary world around him. The thirteen last years of Swinburne's life were spent almost as if within a Leyden jar. Nothing could be more motionless than the existence of "the little old genius, and his little old acolyte, in their dull little villa." Swinburne still brightened up, with punctilious courtesy, at the approach of any visitor who contrived to break through the double guard of the housemaid and of Watts-Dunton. He would still stand by his shelf of precious quartos and astonish a guest, as he did the Dutch novelist, Maarten Maartens, by presenting volume after volume for inspection, with "the strangely dancing quiver and flash of his little body, like a living flame." Still on moderate pressure he would read aloud with a mannered outpour of tumultuous utterance, and then sink back, exhausted and radiant. Still he would talk, in the familiar tones, of the life-long objects of his admiration, of Landor and Hugo and Marlowe, of Northumberland and Niton and Sark, "bobbing all the while like a cork on the sea of his enthusiasms.' Still he would dream, with eyelids wide open, long gazing at the light in silence, until, as Mr. Coulson Kernahan has admirably said, "one could see by his flashing eyes that the hounds of utterance were chafing and fretting to fling themselves on the quarry," and then the torrent of reminiscent speech would follow. Under the ceaseless vigilance of his faithful shield and companion the placid months went by until, in November 1903, after one of his long walks in the rain, Swinburne caught a chill which presently developed into a dangerous attack of pneumonia. With great difficulty his life was saved by the assiduity and skill of Sir Thomas Barlow. From this time forth his lungs remained delicate, but he lived nearly six years longer. Several publications amused his leisure during the placid close of his career- a collection of lyrical poems, A Channel Passage (1904); novel, Love's Cross-Currents (1905, but written twenty-nine years earlier); and the opening of a drama, The Duke of Gandia (1908, but started in 1882). He persisted in writing verses, as he frankly confessed, "to escape from boredom." He continued to enjoy good health, although now as prematurely old as in early days he had been conspicuously young for his years. Nothing foreshadowed a change when only a fortnight before his death he received at The Pines Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, who has been kind enough to give me his impressions of the visit. "Mr. Swinburne," he writes, "returned from his usual walk, looking tired, but not evidently unwell. After luncheon he invited me to go up to his study and look at his books. They were fewer than one might expect to find in the study of a famous man-of-letters. Swinburne displayed his collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists with ingenuous pride, and when I ventured to compliment him on his rarities, he smiled and said, 'Yes! not bad for a poor man, are they?' Glancing at the other books on the shelves, I caught sight of various volumes of Victor Hugo, very much the worse for wear. In reply to some remark about them, Swinburne replied, "They ought to go to the binder, but I can't bear to part with them."" It was, therefore, in the unabated fervour of a life-time that death found this faithful lover of Marlowe and Hugo. His illness was brief and scarcely painful. The sharpness of Easter in 1909 produced an epidemic of influenza at The Pines, which affected every member of WattsDunton's household, and in Swinburne's case brought on what soon became double pneumonia, His physician, Dr. Edwin White, sent for Sir Douglas Powell, but the course of the disease could not be arrested, and the poet died, very peacefully, on the 10th of April 1909, having entered his seventy-third year by five days. Algernon Swinburne was buried in the romantic churchyard of Bonchurch, in the midst of the 1 graves of his family. He lies in that beautiful orchard-terrace, within an apple-cast of the garden in which his childhood was so happily spent. On loud nights the trumpet of the sea is audible from the spot where he sleeps, and so, in the words dedicated to his memory by the greatest of his successors, .. here, beneath the waking constellations, Where the waves peal their everlasting strains, And their dull subterrene reverberations Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains Him once their peer in sad improvisations, And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes, 1 Thomas Hardy: "A Singer Asleep." CHAPTER IX PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS THE connection which undoubtedly exists, in certain cases only, between imaginative gifts of a high order and peculiarities of physical conformation, has never been explained. It is not by mere accident that Chopin and Raphael and Shelley have a constitution and an appearance so unlike those of ordinary mortals, nor is it the rule that men of genius are, like Walter Scott and Robert Browning, healthy examples of the ordinary type. There is no rule or custom in the matter, and great talents blow where they list. Nevertheless there is a tendency to strangeness, an excess or violence of delicacy, which is proverbially associated with poetry, and with the bardic appearance of exclusively aesthetic persons. This, although not the rule, is more than the exception, and, where it occurs, is not to be neglected as an element in the general analysis of character. In the case of Swinburne the physical strangeness exceeded, perhaps, that of any other entirely sane man of imaginative genius whose characteristics have been preserved for us. It must be defined with as much exactitude as is possible without falling into the error of caricature. Algernon Swinburne was in height five feet |