Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/14

 and give to men the high pleasure which is the use and honour of his art. He has done that for us, he has secured to English poetry a devotion to beauty. But in his own time his effort failed. There was no response. Charmed he never so wisely, England, a deaf adder, stopped her ears. The poetry of Keats awakened no new poetic life in the England of his time; it had no children then.

There was one man, however, who might be called a younger brother of Keats, and whom we cannot class among those who merely kept poetry alive in the years which followed the deaths of Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Charles Wells stands on a higher level than the poets of that weak parenthesis which ended with the rise of Browning and Tennyson in the famous years of 1830 to 1833, When romance was re-born both in France and England. Inferior in genius and in art to Keats, he was his personal friend, and drank of his spirit. But the deadness of the time seized on him and he only produced a single poem—the drama of Joseph and his Brethren. As Keats revealed afresh the beauty of the Greek and mediæval stories, so Wells unfolded the beauty of a Hebrew tale, recast it for modern thought and feeling, and filled its outlines with modern imaginations. Nevertheless, and this marks his power and taste, he did not spoil its simplicity.

When we have read the drama, the old story still stands apart with quiet steadfastness. It is not spoiled by its new clothing. Yet what we read is Western not