Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/159

 rage, were to him, if ever he deigned to be conscious of them, weariness and vexation of spirit. And the condition of the England in which he lived and of which he said, "Glory and loveliness have passed away," gave him no impulse. He did not go to Italy or Greece in the body, but he fled thither in the spirit. He sought loveliness and young ardours in fable, in love's world of myth, legend, and tale. There, he thought, beauty lies asleep, and I will be the young prince who shall awake her. And through the deep undergrowth not of the briar-rose, but of thorn and thistle, hemlock and darnel, his fervid spirit pierced its way. He kissed the princess and she awoke to life. Together they brought forth a new poetry. It was a lovely child, but, unsupported, unnourished by any emotion of the present, only living in the past, it never married itself to any vital power in the England of its day, and it had then no children. It was an episode in the great epic of poetry; and when the new movement, about 1832, began with Tennyson and Browning it did not follow Keats into the beauty of the past; it knit itself to living emotions and ideas of the present. For England had then, as I have already noticed in this book, awakened to fresh thought and national passion, to new ideas and their attendant emotions; and out of these proceeded powers of action which ran like fire through the whole body of men and women who loved thoughts, and thought out what they loved.

That is a slight sketch of the history of the poetry of