"Atalanta" was a revelation; there was a
new and original poet here, a Balliol man, too. In my own mind
"Atalanta" remains the best, the most beautiful, the most musical of Mr.
Swinburne's many poems. He instantly became the easily parodied model of
undergraduate versifiers.
Swinburnian prize poems, even, were attempted, without success. As yet
we had not seen Mr. Matthew Arnold's verses. I fell in love with them,
one long vacation, and never fell out of love. He is not, and cannot be,
the poet of the wide world, but his charm is all the more powerful over
those whom he attracts and subdues. He is the one Oxford poet of Oxford,
and his "Scholar Gypsy" is our "Lycidas." At this time he was Professor
of Poetry; but, alas, he lectured just at the hour when wickets were
pitched on Cowley Marsh, and I never was present at his discourses, at
his humorous prophecies of England's fate, which are coming all too true.
So many weary lectures had to be attended, could not be "cut," that we
abstained from lectures of supererogation, so to speak. For the rest
there was no "literary movement" among contemporary undergraduates. They
read for the schools, and they rowed and played cricket. We had no
poets, except the stroke of the Corpus boat, Mr. Bridges, and he
concealed his courtship of the Muse. Corpus is a small college, but Mr.
Bridges pulled its boat to the proud place of second on the river.
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