Morris was not alone in giving literary expression to the classical revival. Swinburne did so no less effectively in Atalanta in Ca!ydon> the verse drama he published in March 1865 and described himself as "pure Greek" in form and spir- it. But it is Poems and Ballads, published the following year, that is more relevant to Burne-Jones, to whom indeed the book is dedicated. Here, as in The Earthly Paradise, there are poems which correspond to specific paintings, most obviously "Laus Veneris" (cat. no. 63) but also "Saint Dorothy" (fig. 66), a theme which seems to have obsessed the circle at this date. (The saint was also the subject of a poem published in 1865 by Bute Montgomerie Rankling, a minor poet associated with the Poetry without Grammar School.) Equally striking is the Burne-Jonesian mood that Swinburne (fig. 78) evokes in sev- eral poems, not least the first in the book, "A Ballad of Life": I found in dreams a place of wind and flowers, Full of sweet trees and colour of glad grass, In midst whereof there was A lady clothed like summer with sweet hours, Her beauty, fervent as a fiery moon, Made my blood burn and swoon Like a flame rained upon. Sorrow had filled her shaken eyelids' blue, And her mouth's sad red heavy rose all through Seemed sad with glad things gone. The last lines are particularly significant. The words "glad" and "sad" frequently occur in close conjunction in Swinburne's poetry and prose of the 1860s, and it was no doubt precisely this wistful ambiguity that Burne-Jones was trying to capture in the soulful expression he was now giving to nearly all his figures. Harry Quilter may not have been the most profound of critics (as his enemy Whistler never tired of saying), but he was right when he wrote that u Poems and Ballads was only the poetical expression of Pre-Raphaelitism as exemplified in Burne-Jones's pictures." 42