ose and flourished, and
though the trees themselves have at length fallen, the shadow of their
names is almost as great as ever.

The first of these two groups, the fourth of our present classification,
renews, as has been said before, the features of its twenty or thirty
years older forerunner, the group between Keats and Tennyson, in a most
curious and attractive fashion. Once more we find the notes of
uncertainty, of straying into paths,--not always quite blind-alleys, but
bye-paths certainly,--the presence of isolated burst and flash, of
effort unsuccessful or unequal as a whole. But here we find, what in the
earlier chapter or section we do not find, distinct imitativeness and
positive school-following. This imitation, attempting Shelley at times
with little success (for, let it be repeated, Shelley is not imitable),
selected in regular chronological order, three masters, Wordsworth,
Tennyson, and Browning, though in each stage the master of the preceding
rather shared than yielded his chair. It has been said in a famous
passage that Wordsworth was more read about sixty years ago than at any
time before or since, and this may perhaps be true. But his influence on
writers has not depended on his popularity with readers, and from Sir
Aubrey de Vere, who was born more than a century ago, to verse-writers
who have only just published, his unmistakable tone, the tone which, so
far as we can see, would never have been if Wordsworth had never
existed, shows itself. The writing influence of Tennyson did not begin
till the issue of the _Poems_ of 1842, but it began almost immediately
then, and has remained in full force to the present day. It is an
influence somewhat more external and technical than Wordsworth's, but
for that reason even more unmistakable, and some of its results are
among the most curious of school-copies in literature. As for Browning,
imitation there tried both the outside and the inside, not very often
with happy results, but, of course, with results even more obvious to
the most uncritical eye than the results of the imitation of Tennyson
itself.

The attempts to be original and to break away from these and their
imitations--the principal of them being that of the so-called Spasmodic
school, which flourished at the dead waist and middle of the
century--were not particularly happy, and those who incline to gloomy
views may say that the imitation was less happy still. In Mr. Matthew
Arnold, a recalcitr