stitutional creed. A careful study
of his subsequent poetry will show that in these early poems
he accurately and distinctly revealed the attitude toward
outside things which he has since maintained. He is a good deal
of an institutional poet, and, as compared with Browning,
a STRONGLY institutional poet. Browning's supreme and
all-absorbing interest is in individual souls. He cares but little,
evidently, about institutions. At any rate, he gives them little
or no place in his poetry. Tennyson is a very decided
reactionary product of the revolutionary spirit which inspired
some of his poetical predecessors of the previous generation.
He has a horror of the revolutionary. To him, the French Revolution
was "the blind hysterics of the Celt", {`In Memoriam', cix.},
and "the red fool-fury of the Seine" {`I. M.', cxxvii.}.
He attaches great importance to the outside arrangements of society
for upholding and advancing the individual. He would "make Knowledge
circle with the winds", but "her herald, Reverence", must

"fly
Before her to whatever sky
Bear seed of men and growth of minds."

He has a great regard for precedents, almost AS precedents.
He is emphatically the poet of law and order. All his sympathies
are decidedly, but not narrowly, conservative. He is, in short,
a choice product of nineteenth century ENGLISH civilization;
and his poetry may be said to be the most distinct expression
of the refinements of English culture--refinements, rather than
the ruder but more vital forms of English strength and power.
All his ideals of institutions and the general machinery of life,
are derived from England. She is

"the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land where, girt with friends or foes,
A man may speak the thing he will;

A land of SETTLED GOVERNMENT,
A LAND OF JUST AND OLD RENOWN,
WHERE FREEDOM BROADENS SLOWLY DOWN
FROM PRECEDENT TO PRECEDENT:

Where faction seldom gathers head,
But by degrees to fullness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread."

But the anti-revolutionary and the institutional features
of Tennyson's poetry are not those of the higher ground of his poetry.
They are features which, though primarily due, it may be,
to the poet's temperament, are indirectly due to the particular form
of civilization in which he has l