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characteristic of Southey's greater successor as Poet Laureate. William Wordsworth 1770-1850 had written all the poems by which he will live when the Queen came to the throne, but further recognition awaited the author of "Lyrical Ballads" and "Laodamia" in the thirteen years of his life that were yet to come. It was in 1839 that Keble, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, welcomed Wordsworth when he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. with the eulogy that he had "shed a celestial light upon the affections, the occupations and the piety of the poor." In 1842 he obtained an annuity from the Civil List, and in the following year he succeeded Southey as laureate. The mere fact, however, that Wordsworth wrote nothing of importance in the present reign does not permit of his dismissal as a pre-Victorian author. His real influence, splendid and serene, was made upon the age which is passing away.

      He found us when the age had bound

      Our souls in its benumbing round;

      He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.

      During the period in which Wordsworth's poems were coming from the press he was scoffed at alike by Byron and by the authors of "Rejected Addresses," and they appealed to a sympathetic audience. Coleridge had, indeed, praised him generously enough, but the author of "The Ode to Duty" knew nothing of the enthusiastic partisanship which was to be his lot in the later years of his life, and for more than a quarter of a century after his death. I have before me two books which will serve to indicate the high-water-mark of Wordsworth's popularity. One is a volume of selections from his poems, which was edited by Mr Matthew Arnold,[3] the other, a volume of Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, which was privately issued to the members. In his little volume of "Selections" Mr Arnold, then recognised on all hands as our most important living critic, insisted upon Wordsworth's pre-eminence in poetry, placing him indeed on a level with Shakspere and Milton, and assigning to Byron and Shelley a secondary rank.

      Mr Arnold, as events proved, only echoed a pervading sentiment. The Wordsworth Society was founded, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dean of St Paul's, the Lord Chief Justice of England, the then American Minister—Mr Lowell—and a number of distinguished literary men, among its members. The Transactions of that Society give evidence that among the thoughtful men and women of the last decade Wordsworth was by far the strongest influence, that he was not merely a literary tradition, but that he was a vital force in the minds and hearts of nearly all the most interesting people of the period. Students of to-day, however, will be well content to read Wordsworth only in Matthew Arnold's "Selections." Here they will find him as a sonneteer proclaiming liberty with scarcely less zeal and power than Milton. They will find him as the sympathetic friend of the poor and of the oppressed. To be dead to the charm of Matthew Arnold's "Selections from Wordsworth" is to care nothing for poetry. To appreciate with any measure of enthusiasm the twelve volumes of Wordsworth's collected writings is equally to have one's sense of true poetry deadened and destroyed. We have no time now for "The Excursion" and "The Prelude." We have less for Wordsworth's "Ecclesiastical Sonnets" and "The Borderers." For his copious prose moralizings one has no toleration whatever.

      It is not easy to judge whether Alfred Tennyson 1809-1892 will ever cease to retain the very wide hold upon the public which was his for at least thirty years prior to his death, and which is his to-day. The poems of Tennyson might be read by succeeding generations of Englishmen if only for their exquisite purity of style. Music he has also in abundance. In "Harold," "Queen Mary," and his other plays there is no great gift of characterisation, and these assuredly will go the way of Southey's more ambitious poems. But in "Maud" Tennyson caught the social aspiration of his time with singular insight. The world, he pleaded—and England in particular—was given over to money-getting. The capitalist was more tyrannical than the old, expiring slave-owner. Even peace was a mere word. There was a worse tyranny than that which left men for dead on the battle-field. There was the tyranny which ground them to dust for a bare pittance in mill and factory. Tennyson never wrote with greater force or with more perfect dramatic and lyric art, and his poem is as striking and effective to-day as at the time of its publication in 1855.

      Lord Tennyson—for the Poet Laureate accepted a peerage in 1890—won the hearts of a wider audience by "In Memoriam," and of a still larger one by "The Idylls of the King." "In Memoriam," a lengthy elegy on his college friend, Arthur Hallam, touched the great religious public of England. The poem reflected a certain transcendentalism of view which was fast becoming fashionable.

      "There lives more faith in honest doubt,

      Believe me, than in half the creeds"

      was, in fact, more and more the prevailing tone among all phases of Protestantism where a few years earlier the exact opposite had been insisted upon.

      One of the most agreeable pictures which our literary period affords is offered by the friendship between Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. The two men were not seldom compared; each had his partisans, and each his enthusiastic disciples. Neither from a social nor from a literary point of view would they seem to have had much in common. Browning was a regular diner-out, he appeared systematically at every picture-gallery, and at every public entertainment, and in all these things he was keenly interested: he loved society. Lord Tennyson, on the other hand, lived a retired life in one or other of his country houses. He was morbidly sensitive to the attentions of the crowd, and amusing stories are told of his desire to avoid the "vulgar" gaze. Considered as literary men, the contrast between these poets was greater. Tennyson's language was dainty, simple, full of grace; his characters monotonous, lacking in vigour. Browning wrote with rugged force, and sometimes with an obscurity which left the reader bewildered. But his gift of characterisation was superb, and his men and women for individuality are comparable only to those of Shakspere. The hearts of all of us go out to Tennyson when we think of the music of his verses, of his gifts of natural description, his fine and captivating imagination; but our hearts and our intellects go out to Browning, as to one who has enshrined our best thoughts, who has touched all our deepest emotions. It is true that half of Browning's sixteen volumes are flatly incomprehensible to the majority of us; but the other half are equal in bulk to the whole of Lord Tennyson's writings, and quite free from any suspicion of obscurity. The "Ring and the Book" is not obscure. It is an exciting story, dramatically told. So also are the poems called "Men and Women," and the "Dramatic Idyls." "Luria," "In a Balcony," "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," are as readable as railway novels. And yet Browning had, and has, none of the popularity of Tennyson. The one writer sold by thousands, and his financial reward was probably unprecedented in poetry; the other had but a small audience, an audience which never approached to one-third of his rival's. Notwithstanding all this, it is pleasing to note that the two poets loyally esteemed one another, as the dedication of some of their books conspicuously proves.

      To write thus early of Robert Browning 1812-1889 is to anticipate in the literary record. "Pauline," the poet's first poem, was published, it is true, in 1833; and that and successive poems were accepted by good critics as the work of a true poet. Nevertheless, Browning had to fight his way as no poet of equal merit has ever had to do, and it was very late indeed in the Victorian epoch that he became more than the poet of a limited circle. One there was, certainly, who appreciated his work from the first with no common fervour, for the world has long been familiar with the statement that a reference by Elizabeth Barrett in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" first brought the two poets together in 1845—

      "From Browning some 'Pomegranate'

      Which, if cut deep down the middle,

      Shows a heart within blood-tinctured,

      Of a veined humanity."

      They were married a year later. As exemplifying the condescension of their earlier contemporaries it is interesting to note Wordsworth's observation on the event—and Wordsworth had no humour—"So, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together! Well, I hope they may understand each other—nobody else could!" Lord Granville, who was staying in Florence when a son was born to the poets there in 1849, was still more amusing although equally uncritical. "Now there are not two incomprehensibles but three incomprehensibles," he said.

      It cannot be charged against Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806-1861 that she was in the least incomprehensible. Her "Cry

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