masses,
however, did not care for uninteresting or abstruse works. The
majority of books drawn from the circulating libraries were novels.

The scientific spirit of the age impelled the greatest novelists to
try to paint actual life as it impressed them. Dickens chose the lower
classes in London; Thackeray, the clubs and fashionable world; George
Eliot, the country life near her birthplace in Warwickshire; Hardy,
the people of his Wessex; Meredith, the cosmopolitan life of
egotistical man; Kipling, the life of India both in jungle and camp,
as well as the life of the great outer world. These writers of fiction
all sought a realistic background, although some of them did not
hesitate to use romantic touches to heighten the general effect.
Stevenson was the chief writer of romances.

The Trend of Poetry: Minor Poets.--The Victorian age was dominated
by two great poets,--Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Browning
showed the influence of science in his tendency to analyze human
motives and actions. In one line of _Fra Lippo Lippi_, he voices the
new poetic attitude toward the world:--

"To find its meaning is my meat and drink."

Browning advanced into new fields, while Tennyson was more content to
make a beautiful poetic translation of much of the thought of the age.
In his youth he wrote:--

"Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time."

From merely reading Tennyson's verse, one could gauge quite accurately
the trend of Victorian scientific thought.

The poetry of both Browning and Tennyson is so resonant with faith
that they have been called great religious teachers. Rudyard Kipling,
the poet of imperialistic England, of her "far-flung battle line,"
attributes her "dominion over palm and pine" to faith in the "Lord God
of Hosts."

In the minor poets, there is often a different strain. Arnold is beset
with doubt, and hears no "clear call," such as Tennyson voices in
_Crossing the Bar_. Swinburne, seeing the pessimistic side of the
shield of evolution, exclaims:--

"Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men."

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), Oxford tutor, traveler, and
educational examiner, was a poet who struggled with the doubt of the
age. He loved--

"To finger idly some old Gordian knot,
Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave,
And with much toil attain to half-believe."

His verse would be forgotten