rerunners would have spun into long poems--the result
here is, as a rule, far in advance of those forerunners in this
respect, and as an exception on a level with the very best of their
exceptions. With Shakespeare there is no comparison; Shakespeare can
send to every poet an "O of Giotto" in his own style to which that poet
must bow. But of others only Spenser had hitherto drawn such pictures as
those of the "Palace" and the "Dream," and Spenser had done them in far
less terse fashion than Tennyson. Only Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake,
perhaps Beddoes, and a few Elizabethans had poured into the veins of
language the ineffable musical throb of a score of pieces from
"Claribel" to "Break! Break!" and not one of them had done it in quite
the same way. Only Milton, with Thomson as a far distant second, had
impressed upon non-dramatic blank verse such a swell and surge as that
of "Oenone." And about all these different kinds and others there
clung and rang a peculiar dreamy slow music which was heard for the
first time, and which has never been reproduced,--a music which in "The
Lotos Eaters," impossible as it might have seemed, adds a new charm
after the _Faerie Queen_, after the _Castle of Indolence_, after the
_Revolt of Islam_ to the Spenserian stanza, which makes the stately
verses of the "Palace" and the "Dream" tremble and cry with melodious
emotion, and which accomplishes the miracle of the poet's own dying swan
in a hundred other poems all "flooded over with eddying song."

But there is something more to be noted still. The poet had caught and
was utilising the spirit of his time in two ways, one of them almost
entirely new. That he constantly sang the subjective view of nature may
be set down to the fact that he came after Wordsworth, though the fact
that he sang it without the Wordsworthian dryness and dulness must be
set down to his own credit. But in that sense of the history of former
times which is perhaps the chief glory of the nineteenth century in
matters of thought he had been anticipated by no one. He might not have
attained it without Scott and Byron, but his expression of it was hardly
conditioned in the very slightest degree by the expression either of
Byron or of Scott. They were not in strictness men of the nineteenth
century; he was, and he represented the very best features of his time
in attending, from its point of view mainly, to the features of better
times.

But if FitzGerald's dictum were