f his English idylls are conceived
with as much breadth of sympathy and richness of humour, as purely and
as surely, as the peasants of Chaucer or Burns. A note of passionate
humanity is indeed in all his work. It makes vivid and intense his
scholarly handling of Greek myth; always the unchanging human aspect of
it attracts him most, in Oenone's grief, in the indomitableness of
Ulysses, the weariness and disillusionment in Tithonus. It has been the
cause of the comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his generation
takes such a human attitude to death. Shelley could yearn for the
infinite, Browning treat it as the last and greatest adventure, Arnold
meet it clear eyed and resigned. To Wordsworth it is the mere return of
man the transient to Nature the eternal.

"No motion has she now; no force,
She neither hears nor sees,
Roiled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees."

To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human home-sickness for familiar
things.

"Ah, sad and strange as on dark summer dawns,
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square."

It is an accent which wakes an echo in a thousand hearts.

(2)

While Tennyson, in his own special way and, so to speak, in
collaboration with the spirit of the age, was carrying on the work of
Romanticism on its normal lines, Browning was finding a new style and a
new subject matter. In his youth he had begun as an imitator of Shelley,
and _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_ remain to show what the influence of the
"sun-treader" was on his poetry. But as early as his second publication,
_Bells and Pomegranates_, he had begun to speak for himself, and with
_Men and Women_, a series of poems of amazing variety and brilliance, he
placed himself unassailably in the first rank. Like Tennyson's, his
genius continued high and undimmed while life was left him. _Men and
Women_ was followed by an extraordinary narrative poem, _The Ring and
the Book_, and it by several volumes of scarcely less brilliance, the
last of which appeared on the very day of his death.

Of the two classes into which, as we saw when we were studying Burns,
creative artists can be divided, Browning belongs to that one which
makes everything new for itself, and has in consequence to educate the
readers by whom its work can alone be judged. He was an innovator in
nearly everything he did; he thought for himsel