him the same kind of
consolation as the impulses from a vernal wood that Wordsworth
celebrated in his purely nature poetry. Compare with Wordsworth,
Browning, and note the fundamental change in the attitude of the poet
that his work reveals. _Pippa Passes_ is a poem on exactly the same
scheme as the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, but in treatment no two things
could be further apart. The intervention of Pippa is dramatic, and
though her song is in the same key as the wordless message of
Wordsworth's beggar she is a world apart from him, because she is
something not out of natural history, but out of life. The Victorian age
extended the imaginative sensibility which its predecessor had brought
to bear on nature and history, to the complexities of human life. It
searched for individuality in character, studied it with a loving
minuteness, and built up out of its discoveries amongst men and women a
body of literature which in its very mode of conception was more closely
related to life, and thus the object of greater interest and excitement
to its readers, than anything which had been written in the previous
ages. It is the direct result of this extension of romanticism that the
novel became the characteristic means of literary expression of the
time, and that Browning, the poet who more than all others represents
the essential spirit of his age, should have been as it were, a novelist
in verse. Only one other literary form, indeed, could have ministered
adequately to this awakened interest, but by some luck not easy to
understand, the drama, which might have done with greater economy and
directness the work the novel had to do, remained outside the main
stream of literary activity. To the drama at last it would seem that we
are returning, and it may be that in the future the direct
representation of the clash of human life which is still mainly in the
hands of our novelists, may come back to its own domain.

The Victorian age then added humanity to nature and art as the
subject-matter of literature. But it went further than that. For the
first time since the Renaissance, came an era which was conscious of
itself as an epoch in the history of mankind, and confident of its
mission. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revolutionized
cosmography, and altered the face of the physical world. The nineteenth
century, by the discoveries of its men of science, and by the remarkable
and rapid succession of inventions which revolutioniz