Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/88

 literature. For these two orders various names may be found—the obedient and the exorbitant, law and impulse, angels and devils, in Blake's meaning of these words, which is not on the side of the angels. But if you look closer at the great champions, though you will not find their differences less interesting, you will find that these are not so epigrammatically neat as they might at first appear. There is more likeness of Macaulay to Carlyle, and of Carlyle to Macaulay than one thought; Tennyson is not so angelic nor Browning so rebellious as he should be for the purposes of a rhetorical explosive contrast. Between Tennyson and Browning there are strong affinities, the same sort of power, largely the same ideas, the same policy. Compare Joannes Agricola and St. Simeon Stylites; consider again the way both poets took the dramatic monologue as vehicle for much of their most original thought, and the way the thought of Ulysses corresponds to the ruling passion of Browning. If Fra Lippo Lippi and Bishop Blougram's Apology, and still more Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau are diffuse beyond the limit of Tennyson's idyllic form, remember the other poems, so richly compact: Artemis Prologises and The Bishop orders his tomb in St. Praxed's.

The resemblance goes far deeper than this choice of a frame or these coincidences of thought. The poetic invention of Tennyson and Browning alike is shown in their rhyming forms. Their new melodies carry on the life that had been recovered by the poets before them; they are the successors of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Shelley and Keats, in the freedom and variety of their verse. Let no one think that this is merely an affair of prosody; or rather, let no one think that prosody is merely a science of patterns. Some people may see nothing more in the stanza than a figure on the printed page, like the figures of those old-fashioned metrical toys, the poems composed in the shape of an altar or a pair of wings. But the difference between the verse of Abt Vogler