Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/80

 pulsion or any sense of duty, or any uncomfortable feeling that the poems are antiquated now. For poetry, we have still to live in the nineteenth century. A hundred years ago things were otherwise. In Miss Austen's time people read Cowper still. But Cowper is already coming to be old-fashioned in the literary conversations at Lyme between Anne Elliot and Captain Benwick—'having talked of poetry, the richness of the present age, and gone through a brief comparison of opinion as to the first-rate poets, trying to ascertain whether Marmion or The Lady of the Lake were to be preferred, and how ranked the Giaour and The Bride of Abydos, and, moreover, how the Giaour was to be pronounced &hellip;' Cowper is old-fashioned, though his poems appeared in the eighties, and would correspond in date more nearly to Departmental Ditties than to Men and Women. The dates of Stevenson may be compared with the dates of Burns. When we read Scott's account of his meeting with Burns we think of Burns as a poet of a different age and world. Yet if you 'apply' the nineteenth-century dates to the eighteenth century, in the manner recommended by Euclid for triangles, 'so that the line AB may be upon the line DE it will appear that Stevenson was born nine years earlier than Burns, and died before him. And we are surprised to find that Burns is so far left behind in 1810, that Stevenson is so near to us now.

The fact is plain, that there has been no such poetic revolution in this century as there was in the last; and though we may complain of some injustice in the way that things are shared by the Muses, the stewards of Helicon, there is compensation in the longer life and more enduring value of the older authors, more particularly of Tennyson and Browning.

Possibly the lapse of time may have made Browning easier; perhaps the poetry of George Meredith may have made Browning's verse less difficult in comparison. One