It is not surprising, therefore, that this first volume of poems, saturated with intoxicating Hedonism, had, as Mr. Swinburne wrote in the Dedicatory Preface appended to the full collection of his works, 'as quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard or read of.' The eruption of neo-paganism was sudden and unexpectedly violent--the rumblings of scientific and philosophic scepticism had given no warning of a volcanic explosion in this direction. The current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of Byron's time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the middle class was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who presided over man's unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than somewhat aghast at the invocations of Astarte or Ashtaroth, or the cry to Our Lady of Pain, the 'noble and nude and antique.' The result was that the first edition of the _Poems and Ballads_ was withdrawn, though they were reissued in the same year, when Mr. Swinburne published a reply to his critics. Nevertheless, although the graver and, we may say, the higher judges of what was admissible to a nineteenth-century poet were entirely against him, it cannot be denied that the impulsive youth of that generation felt the enchantment of Mr. Swinburne's intoxicating love-potions--were sorely tempted to dash down Tennyson on the drawing-room table, and to join the wild dance round the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemia.
In the _Poems and Ballads_ Mr. Swinburne keeps on some terms, so to speak, with theology. In the poem entitled 'A Litany' the Lord God discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before Him, and threatens them with 'the inevitable Hell,' while the people implore mercy--a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian martyr. It is true that he looks back with æsthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps the finest poem in this volume is the 'Hymn to Proserpine,' where a votary of the ancient divinities confesses sorrowfully that a new and austere faith has triumphed, but predicts that its kingdom will not last, will decline and fall like the empire of the elder gods--