Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/625

 Meanwhile purely literary forces were tending to create a more appreciative sympathy with classical literature. Among these the foremost place must be given to the influence of Tennyson; not only when it is direct, in the series of his poems on classical themes, but as it operates generally by his artistic perfection of form, which is always, in spirit, classical. In this large sense he has been, for our age, the most powerful poetical mediator between the antique masters and the English-speaking world. And there is another poet, one whom those who love him will not fear to call great, whose effectiveness in this way can be deemed second only to the late Laureate's,—I mean Matthew Arnold. His influence, inevitably less popular, quickened the perceptions of a comparatively limited public, yet one which included not a few of those by whom literary opinion is gradually moulded. This is not the time to estimate all that Matthew Arnold did for Hellenism; but, as we know, he wrought in two ways; by example, in his own exquisite poetry; and by precept, as in his lectures on translating Homer, and generally in his critical essays. Robert Browning had less of native sympathy with the classical spirit than is shown by his gifted wife; his normal style is far from classical; but his marvellous wealth of poetical thought is seen in "Balaustion's Adventure," the new garb in which he has clothed the "Alcestis" of Euripides; and in that "Apology," so instinct with modern subtlety, which he puts into the mouth of