Beyond them we must not go, nor inquire whether the poets who have not
come to forty years represent a new school of the masterful and supreme
kind, or one of the experimental and striving sort, or something a good
deal worse than this, a period of sheer interval and suspense,
unenlivened even by considerable attempt. Not only our scheme, not only
common prudence and politeness, but most of all the conditions of
critical necessity insist on the curtain being here dropped. It is
possible that a critic may be able to isolate and project himself
sufficiently to judge, as posterity will judge them, the actually
accomplished work of his own contemporaries and juniors. But even such a
skilful and fortunate person cannot judge the work which they have not
yet produced, and which may in all cases, and must in some, modify their
position and alter their rank.

But what has been has been, and on this mass (not in the actual case
"vulgar" by any means) of things done it is possible to pronounce
securely. And with security it may be said that for total amount, total
merit, total claims of freshness and distinctness, no period of poetical
literature can much, if at all, exceed the ninety years of English verse
from _The Ancient Mariner_ to _Crossing the Bar_. The world has had few
poets better than the best of ours during this time in degree; it has
had none like Shelley, perhaps none exactly like Wordsworth, in kind.
The secret of long narrative poems that should interest has been
recovered; the sonnet, one of the smallest but one of the most perfect
of poetic forms, has been recovered likewise. Attempts to recover the
poetic drama have been mostly failures; and serious satire has hardly
reappeared. But lighter satire, with other "applied" poetry, has shown
variety and excellence. Above all lyric, the most poetic kind of poetry,
has attained a perfection never known before, except once in England and
once in Greece. It has been impossible hitherto to make a full and free
anthology of the lyric poets from Burns and Blake to Tennyson and
Browning to match the anthologies often made of those from Surrey or
Sidney to Herrick or Vaughan. But when it can be done it is a question
whether the later volume will not even excel the earlier in intensity
and variety, if not perhaps in freshness of charm.

And then it is needful once more to insist, even at the risk of
disgusting, on the additional interest given by the subtle and delicate,