Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/19

 imitated Byron. They sang with exquisite feebleness of guilty heroes, they sought to be as world-forsaken, as desolately cynical as their model, and they caught his easy music up. Every clerk in a merchant's house, every fantastic lover, made Byronic songs; and the imitation lasted till 1840-50, when Tennyson had taught the imitators a new method.

But the men who were at this time imitated by those who had in their breast some true poetic fire were Shelley and Keats. These inspired Thomas L. Beddoes and George Darley. Beddoes, born in 1803, did "all his poetic work," says Mr. Gosse, "between 1821, when he published the Improvisatore, and 1826 when he practically finished Death's Jest Book." Beddoes was himself aware of the exhaustion of the time. The disappearance of Shelley, he declares, "has been followed by instant darkness, of which whether the vociferous Darley is to be the comet, or tender, full-faced L. E. L. the milk and watery morn, I leave to astrologers to determine. But I prophesy nothing but fog, rain, blight in due succession." The blight fell upon himself. In a few years his invention and power decayed. He took to medicine, misanthropy, and closed in madness, His poems are for the most part fragmentary efforts of a power which had no power to concentrate itself. It is not that his song does not flow unbidden from his lips, as Mr. Gosse thinks, it is that it is too unbidden, not shaped within into clearness, not fed by thought; and its spontaneous utterance, desperately striving by