im were
separable, whereas in poets of the very first rank they are
inseparable. But that towards the end his style lifted his thought to
heights of which even _In Memoriam_ gave no promise cannot, I think,
be questioned by any student of his collected works.

Tennyson belongs, if ever poet belonged, to Class 2: and it is the
prettiest irony of fate that, having unreasonably belauded Class 1, he
is now being found fault with for not conforming to the supposed
requirements of that Class. He, who spoke of the poet as of a seer
"through life and death," is now charged with seeing but a short way
beyond his own nose. The Rev. Stopford Brooke finds that he had little
sympathy with the aspirations of the struggling poor; that he bore
himself coldly towards the burning questions of the hour; that, in
short, he stood anywhere but in advance of his age. As if plenty of
people were not interested in these things! Why, I cannot step out
into the street without running against somebody who is in advance of
the times on some point or another.

Of Virgil and Shakespeare.

Virgil and Shakespeare were neither martyrs nor preachers despised in
their generation. I have said that as poets they also belong to Class
2. Will a champion of the Typical Poet (new style) dispute this, and
argue that Virgil and Shakespeare, though they escaped persecution,
yet began with matter that overweighted their style--with deep
stuttered thoughts--in fine, with a Message to their Time? I think
that view can hardly be maintained. We have the _Eclogues_ before the
_AEneid_; and _The Comedy of Errors_ before _As You Like It_.
Expression comes first; and through expression, thought. These are the
greatest names, or of the greatest: and they belong to Class 2.

Of Milton.

Again, no English poetry is more thoroughly informed with thought than
Milton's. Did he find big thoughts hustling within him for utterance?
And did he at an early age stutter in numbers till his oppressed soul
found relief? And was it thus that he attained the glorious manner of

"Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn...."

--and so on. No, to be short, it was not. At the age of twenty-four,
or thereabouts, he deliberately proposed to himself to be a great
poet. To this end he practised and studied, and travelled unweariedly
until his thirty-first year. Then he tried to make up his mind what to
write about. He took some sheets