long peace after twenty years of fighting; and during the next
generation a milder tone prevailed. For an interval we had only
second-rate artists in verse. The fiery enthusiasts, the despisers of
respectability, were succeeded by poets who were decently emotional,
pensive in thought, tame or affected in style, domestic in theme, with
feeble echoes of the true romantic note in Mrs. Hemans and others.
Next, in the fulness of time, came Tennyson and Browning, to raise
the level of English poetry by their deeper views of life, their
elevation of thought, and their incomparably greater imaginative
power. Tennyson's composition is pellucid and exquisitely refined.
Browning is rugged and often obscure; he cares more for the force than
for the form of expression. The great problems of religion and
politics are seriously and cautiously handled. Browning analyses them
with caustic irony, while Tennyson, after making vain attempts to
solve them, finds consolation in the 'Higher Pantheism.' They are soon
joined by Matthew Arnold and Clough, who represent the melancholy
resignation of sensitive minds that have discarded the creeds, for
whom the miraculous history of Christianity is an illusion that has
faded into the common light of day. Meredith, poet and novelist, falls
back upon communion with Nature; he preaches the doctrine of duty, of
working while the light lasts; he is a high moralist who accepts
stoically the conclusion that nothing beyond terrestrial existence is
knowable.

Thus Mr. Swinburne's elder contemporaries and precursors in poetry
were all in different modes and fashions optimists; at any rate in
their earlier writings. They stood outside the Churches; dogmatic
beliefs they tacitly put away; they were in sympathy with the
Christian ideal apart from its supernatural element; they professed a
vague trust in an unseen Power, chequered here and there by
intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the
central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry
we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of
love, often passionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not
a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson's most impassioned lyrics the
principal figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy,
or caught in the garden with Maud--with intentions strictly honourable
in both cases. The treatment of love by Browning and Meredith is
chiefly psychological; they