Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/32

 These poets opened out the dawn of a new poetic world, and in a few years the sun arose in Tennyson and Browning, moved not only by their own native genius but by the passion of England, now at last awakened into keen life by fresh social, political, artistic, and religious ideas. On them, and their relation to their time and its movements, I have written at large. What I wish now to do, before I come to a discussion of the new elements which entered poetry with Clough and Arnold, is, leaving Tennyson and Browning aside, to follow the ideas of the lesser poets who, in this great awakening, sang the imaginative thinking of mature men, and the devious aspirations of the young.

In the ten years which preceded 1842 when Tennyson collected his poems for the first time, when Browning had published Paracelsus and Sordello, there was, first, one set of poets who rather reverted to Wordsworth than belonged to the new time. They had nothing to do, however, with the half-dead period on which I have written; their poetry was of a steady, temperate, highly cultivated quality. Thought and emotion belonged to it, but it was too philosophic, too much afraid of emotion, and of too curbed an imagination to become of a great or universal influence. It reacted from the more impassioned work of Shelley, Keats, and Byron, to that of Wordsworth—to Wordsworth, not as the youthful poet, but as the poet of The Excursion. Such poetry as that written wildly and