ich distinguishes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley.
The work of each is always at once recognisable by any tolerably
competent judge; but the signs of identity are more composite than
atomic, more derived and literary than essentially native. Browning's
unconventional mannerisms, and his wide range of subject, have made him
seem even less of a mere scholar than Tennyson; but, as a fact, each is
independent enough to a certain extent and to a certain extent only. In
both appears, perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time
in combination with distinct original genius, that indebtedness to the
past, that relapse upon it in the very act of forming vast schemes for
the future, which is more the note of the nineteenth century than
anything else. They not merely have all literature and all history
behind them; but they know it. Yet this knowledge does not weigh on
them. They do not exactly neglect it as Wordsworth and Shelley were
still able to do, but they keep it under. It is the attendant fiend for
which they must find work, but which they never, as too many of their
contemporaries and followers have done, allow to become their master.
And so they two, as it seems to me, do actually win their way to the
first class, not perhaps to the absolutely first division of it, but to
a first class still pretty rigidly limited.

It is not the object of this Conclusion to deal with the performances of
individuals at any length, and therefore I must refer back to the text
for a detailed indication of the position of Keats as the summer-up of
the tradition of the first of the groups or periods here noticed, and
the begetter, master, and teacher of the third, as well as for
descriptions of the different manners in which Tennyson and Browning
respectively shared and distributed between themselves that catholic
curiosity in poetical subject, that exploration of all history and art
and literature, which is the main characteristic of strictly nineteenth
century poetry. But it is very pertinent here to point out the
remarkable way in which these two poets, from the unexampled combination
of length and potency in their poetical period of influence, governed
all the poetry that has followed them. We shall now see that under their
shadow at least two well-marked groups arose, each of magnitude and
individuality sufficient to justify the assignment to it of a separate
position. Yet it was in their shadow that these r