Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/35

 sciousness of this time—each man thinking himself + a universe—were naturally strongest in the young men, and strongest of all in young poets. That Wordsworthian reversion on which I have dwelt, with its philosophy and quietudes, left the hot-tempered, passionate, aspiring, egotistic young men quite unrepresented. It suited grave men or premature young men, like Stuart Mill, but it stirred rebellion in the impetuous who felt that it left half of life untouched. And the new wine in the land, the emotions of ideas growing into form, and shaping themselves into new circumstances, deepened, as all national movements will, the natural excitement of poetic young men, thirsting for fame and love. Therefore their poems begin, for the most part, with vast soliloquies, many pages long, which describe their soul, its ineffable powers and aims; and their own passion to reach the top of fame, not only in poetry, but in everything. Again, the hunger for love in many forms, moral and immoral, was raised by these poets into a kind of religion. It was necessary, they thought, for their full development as poets that they should go through, in many different women, varied aspects of love in its joys, its miseries, and its remorse. Nothing could be more unlike the view of love which Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Shelley, or Keats expressed. With them it was not the whole of life, and it was always naturally treated. These new poets whipped it into a morbid prominence, sometimes into an imaginative sensuality