The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-04-15
From the New York Post.

From the New York Post
 9 HE passing of Swinburne will be
 \0 to many like the closing of the
 door to another of the chambers of romance. And this may be said in an almost literal sense. For years the Pines at Putney Hill, where Swinburne and MT. Watts-Dunton have lived together, has been the goal of longing for the more TO- mantle of England's younger poets. The life of the two men was passed latterly in a kind of fraternal retirement not even much broken. we believe. by the recent marriage of MT. Watts-Dunton; but their home was the refuge of great tradi- ton, and their example an inspiration to those who regretted the on-oreeping of the grayer reign of prose. Not only was the house stored with the pictures and other tangible relics of Rossetti and those others who maintained the protest of rebellious imagination through the mid Victorian days, but something of the very mental atmosphere had been carried from the famous house in Cheyne Walk, where they had waited upon .Rossetti, to their freer dwelling on Putney Hill.
 Swinburne. like his living friend, was both poet and critic, but if the influence of the two is analysed 1t will be found that his power has been primarily in the way of direct example, whereas the hold of MT. Watts-Dunton on the younger gen eration Is more that of the maker of crit ical phrases To the latter. for instance,- we owe the formula, which by the poet ical protestants of today is proclaimed as a summing up of the movement started by Coleridge and Wordsworth and as the watchword for romantic rebellion of to- morrow-the Renascence of Wonder. It ig indeed one of the munitions that come only to the critic of genius; its full mean ing can be appreciated only by those who know how systematically the critics of the early eighteenth century suppressed the sense of wonder-mystery, or enthus- iasm, as they called it-which stirs us in such writers as Sir Thomas Browne, and how deliberately Coleridge attempted 10 restore that emotion. Whether the preach ing of that gospel in the particular form given to it by the par mobile of Putney Hill is altogether suitable to the times, whether there is not a strain of falsetto running through their fury, is another question. At least the tastless indiscre- ton of some of their disciples, such as James Douglas, the biographer of MT. Watts-Dunton, is of kind to make us doubt.
 The part of Swinburne in this battle of the romantics might be characterized, not invidiously as the renascence of sound. When, in 1865, he published his "Atalanta in Calydon," the discerning public knew that here was a music, riot of -rhyth- mical sound which for almost two centuries had not been heard in England. It might be described as renascence of the harmonies of Milton's and Sir Thomas Browne's prose, trained to the measured step of verse but moving with the large ness of an older day. Tennyson had per- haps pointed the way, but he had not found the exultant swing and the impetu- ous disdain that liberated the lines of the younger poet. And if any doubted of the new music they must have been persuaded when the next year came the Poems and Ballads:
 When, with flame all around him as-
 pirant
 Stood flushed, as harp-player stands, The implacable, beautiful tyrant, Rose-crowned, having death in his hands;
 And a sound as the sound of loud water Smote far through the flight of the fires,
 And mixed with the lightning of slaughter A thunder of lyres---
 That stanza of Dolores might almost be taken as portrait of the young poet himself, with his Tyre of thunder, his new l melodies as of the beating of loud water, and, to many it might seem, with his shameless taste for death and the sting of morbid desires
 The sheer delight in prolonged, rever- berant sound was in the man himself There are stories abroad that show him on day of storm pacing swiftly back and forth in room, mouthing out poetry to