Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/157



the course of the history of all the arts, and perhaps most plainly in the history of poetry, similar conditions recur, not in particulars, but in general outline. The different circumstances of each age naturally modify the conditions away from accurate similarity, but in the main development of the art, a time comes when it follows lines resembling those it has previously followed, and this analogous condition has been produced by similar causes. I have already in other places noticed such a similarity between the creation of a literary poetry—to use an inadequate term—by Keats, and that of a similar kind of poetry by Rossetti and Morris. Both poetries have little to do with the age in which they were written. They reject, on the whole, the present and abide in the past. Their subjects are not the subjects of their day, nor are they influenced to any great extent by the thoughts or emotions of the world around them. Their main desire is to live outside of that world, to assimilate a different realm of thought and feeling, to find beauty as she was in the past not as she seems to be in the present, to live in the imagined not in the actual world; and yet to keep the imagined world true to the main lines of