POETRY AND PROSE Poetry.—The first, the most popular, and the most prolific poets of the period were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. Three main interests may be observed in their work and that of their contemporaries and successors. The ideal interest in humanity, best represented in the preceding epoch by Shelley, found its most vivid expression in Browning, whose work, at first written under the spell of the great lyric poet, early took on those traits of vigorous interest in the experiences of man ic:rid which are the source of its originality and populanty. Browning's poems are distinguished for their pervasive feeling for the moods and the experiences of many people of all ages and for the dramatic vigor of their expression. In these respects he represents a verv important movement of the century, and many of the same characterisecs inform the poetry of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
In the second place, the serious moral poetry of Wordsworth, the poetry °of man, of nature and of human life,2 justly celebrated as one of the chief glories of English literature, had a legitimate successor in the grave, reflective poetry of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough. They began writing a few years later than Tennyson and Browning. Like many of their contemporaries, of whom they are the best mouthpieces, they were oppressed by the melancholy of life, and, to a greater degree than their literary prototype, they deal with morals, with duty, with the vanity of human effort and with °the eternal note of sadness?' Their poetry, particularly that of Arnold, is brilliant in style and finely finished, and a high place is accorded to them as exponents of the graver and more solemn side of the poetry of the cen tury. Their temper is expressed in a more sentimental strain in such poets as Arthur O'Shaughnessy.
Contemporaneous with the decline of this impulse, which spent itself in the endeavor to express some solution of the enigma of exist ence, there arose the third school of poets, who, foregoing this quest, gave themselves up to the search for beauty of form and sentiment, who busied themselves with the retelling of old tales, who were concerned with romance, and who strove, for the most part, to recreate a picturesque and ideal world. Three names
stand out conspicuously; the painter-poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; William Morris, poet, story-teller, socialist and manufacturer; and Algernon Charles Swinburne. With them is to be named Christina Rossetti, sister of D. G. Rossetti.
In some respects, Tennyson more than any other poet of the century is representative of these three groups. Beginning, in his first volume (1827), under the spell of Keats, he had within a decade produced much original work and by 1860 established his reputation as the best-beloved poet in England. In much of his earlier work, he treated subjects from human life not unlike those of Browning, though with more calm and repression and less lively vigor. The ethical ideas of his time found, as in Arnold and Clough, a current and lasting expression in many of his shorter lyrics, such as (The Two Voices> and (Locicsley Hall,' as well as in the longer (In Memoriam) (1850) and as
Besides these chief poets, there should be mentioned William Barnes, the painter of the homely life of Dorsetshire; two distinguished writers of vers de societi, Frederick Locicer Lamson and Charles Stuart Calverly; Tenny son's own less celebrated brothers, Frederick Tennyson and Charles Tennyson Turner, Cov entry Patmore and many other poets who have written in a touching way of simple things; and above all, Edward Fitzgerald, whose trans lation of the (Rubaiyat) of Omar Khayyam is not only classical in its finish but also not un representative of much of the melancholy of the poetry of the century. Of contemporary English poets, the greatest amount of popular fame has fallen to Mr. Rudyard Kipling.