ten, in
1835,

Like clouds that rake, the mountain summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!

In these lines is reflected the sorrowful spirit of a literary man of the
early nineteenth century who remembered the glory that had passed away from
the earth. But the leanness of these first years is more apparent than
real. Keats and Shelley were dead, it is true, but already there had
appeared three disciples of these poets who were destined to be far more
widely, read than were their masters. Tennyson had been publishing poetry
since 1827, his first poems appearing almost simultaneously with the last
work of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; but it was not until 1842, with the
publication of his collected poems, in two volumes, that England recognized
in him one of her great literary leaders. So also Elizabeth Barrett had
been writing since 1820, but not till twenty years later did her poems
become deservedly popular; and Browning had published his _Pauline_ in
1833, but it was not until 1846, when he published the last of the series
called _Bells and Pomegranates_, that the reading public began to
appreciate his power and originality. Moreover, even as romanticism seemed
passing away, a group of great prose writers--Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle,
and Ruskin--had already begun to proclaim the literary glory of a new age,
which now seems to rank only just below the Elizabethan and the Romantic
periods.

HISTORICAL SUMMARY. Amid the multitude of social and political forces of
this great age, four things stand out clearly. First, the long struggle of
the Anglo-Saxons for personal liberty is definitely settled, and democracy
becomes the established order of the day. The king, who appeared in an age
of popular weakness and ignorance, and the peers, who came with the Normans
in triumph, are both stripped of their power and left as figureheads of a
past civilization. The last vestige of personal government and of the
divine right of rulers disappears; the House of Commons becomes the ruling
power in England; and a series of new reform bills rapidly extend the
suffrage, until the whole body of English people choose for themselves the
men who shall represent them.

Second, because it is an age of democracy, it is an age of popular
education, of religious tolerance, of growing brotherhood, and of profound
social unrest. The slaves had been fr