Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/18

 mostly full and solemn in sound, loses then its strength in a sweetness too delicate to last. In this magniloquent weakness, he is like some of the Elizabethans, whom indeed he studied. He resembled them in audacious picturesqueness, in inventiveness, in opulent creation of varied characters, and in their love of pageantry. The pageant of the glory of Joseph passing through the city is a splendid invention, blazing with colour and light and companied, step by step, with human interest. Finally, the poem places him within the poetic period in which Shelley, Keats, and Byron wrote. He is too good to be classed among the poets who, after the death of Shelley and Byron did no more than keep poetry alive till Tennyson and Browning appeared.

These poets were imitative, sensational, and sentimental, not possessed by any large or animating ideas. They were possessed only by themselves; they lived in their own shadow and wrote only about it. And they naturally became imitators not creators, rivers that were soon lost in the sand, pale reflections of a glory gone,

There was, first, a set that imitated Wordsworth, who sang of the life of the country, pleasant kindly poets like John Clare, whose three volumes a lazy, rustic squire, yet a lover of country sights and sounds, might read with sympathy, and learn how to deal gently with the poor, and wisely with the land.

Again, there was a set of small versifiers who