In a long experience, before or
after, no one ever approached it; yet one had heard accounts of
the best talking of the time, and read accounts of talkers in all
time, among the rest, of Voltaire, who seemed to approach nearest
the pattern.
That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of
men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite
original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and
convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more he was, even
Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible
memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and
modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of
Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or
Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo. They knew not what to make of
his rhetorical recitation of his own unpublished ballads --
"Faustine"; the "Four Boards of the Coffin Lid"; the "Ballad of
Burdens" -- which he declaimed as though they were books of the
Iliad. It was singular that his most appreciative listener should
have been the author only of pretty verses like "We wandered by
the brook-side," and "She seemed to those that saw them meet";
and who never cared to write in any other tone; but Milnes took
everything into his sympathies, including Americans like young
Adams whose standards were stiffest of all, while Swinburne,
though millions of ages far from them, united them by his humor
even more than by his poetry.
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