learly of the decadence of the art than the
birth of so many poetical "societies"? We have the Browning Society, the
Shelley Society, the Shakespeare Society, the Wordsworth Society--lately
dead. They all demonstrate that people have not the courage to study
verse in solitude, and for their proper pleasure; men and women need
confederates in this adventure. There is safety in numbers, and, by dint
of tea-parties, recitations, discussions, quarrels and the like, Dr.
Furnivall and his friends keep blowing the faint embers on the altar of
Apollo. They cannot raise a flame!

In England we are in the odd position of having several undeniable poets,
and very little new poetry worthy of the name. The chief singers have
outlived, if not their genius, at all events its flowering time. Hard it
is to estimate poetry, so apt we are, by our very nature, to prefer "the
newest songs," as Odysseus says men did even during the war of Troy. Or,
following another ancient example, we say, like the rich niggards who
neglected Theocritus, "Homer is enough for all."

Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinking as dispassionately
as we can, we still seem to read the name of Tennyson in the golden book
of English poetry. I cannot think that he will ever fall to a lower
place, or be among those whom only curious students pore over, like
Gower, Drayton, Donne, and the rest. Lovers of poetry will always read
him as they will read Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, and Chaucer.
Look his defects in the face, throw them into the balance, and how they
disappear before his merits! He is the last and youngest of the mighty
race, born, as it were, out of due time, late, and into a feebler
generation.

Let it be admitted that the gold is not without alloy, that he has a
touch of voluntary affectation, of obscurity, even an occasional
perversity, a mannerism, a set of favourite epithets ("windy" and
"happy"). There is a momentary echo of Donne, of Crashaw, nay, in his
earliest pieces, even a touch of Leigh Hunt. You detect it in pieces
like "Lilian" and "Eleanore," and the others of that kind and of that
date.

Let it be admitted that "In Memoriam" has certain lapses in all that meed
of melodious tears; that there are trivialities which might deserve (here
is an example) "to line a box," or to curl some maiden's locks, that
there are weaknesses of thought, that the poet now speaks of himself as a
linnet, singing "because it mu