the half-dozen great poets of England.

RYDAL MOUNT

Wordsworth’s home.

ALFOXDEN HOUSE

Wordsworth’s temporary home as it is now.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

From the etching by Rajon.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Photographed by Mrs. H. H. Cameron.

LADY TENNYSON

From a painting by G. F. Watts.

HALLAM, LORD TENNYSON

The son of the poet.

TENNYSON’S BEAUTIFUL HOME

Aldworth, at Haslemere, Surrey, England.

It is too soon to assign their permanent places to Tennyson and Browning; but there is little doubt of their survival among the singers whom the world will not forget. Both were fortunately born and well educated, though in different ways; both were happily situated in life; both had ample time in which to give full and rounded expression to their genius. Fame did not come early to either; but it discovered Tennyson in middle life, and for three or four decades it invested him with immense authority. Both were thinkers and students as well as singers, and both had ample intellectual resources. Tennyson was the finer artist; he was, indeed, one of the most perfect artists in the history of poetry. He had command of both harmony and melody; in other words, he could build a poem on strong constructive lines, and he could make it exquisitely musical. He mastered the resources of words; he knew how to use consonants and vowels so as to make his lines sing in the ear; he understood what can be done with assonance (resemblance in sound), repetition, alliteration. He was an expert workman; but never a mechanic alone. The stream of thought was not locked in poetic forms: it flowed freely through them. His art is so perfect that it conceals itself. He was not only a poet of exquisite skill, but he was a vigorous and independent thinker. The future historian of the intellectual and spiritual history of the nineteenth century will find “In Memoriam” what is called “an original authority” of far greater value than the formal records of the time. Some of the early short poems which captivated young readers in the ’30’s and ’40’s of the last century seem somewhat thin and artificial today; but the great mass of Tennyson’s poetry has substance as well as quality, and such poems as “Ulysses,” “Sir Galahad,” the “Two Voices,” have a noble reach of thought as well as a compelling music; while the magic which lives in “Break, Break, Break,” the songs from “The Princess,” “Crossing the Bar,” does not lose its spell. In power of thought, in deep religious feeling unbound by dogmatism, in faith in ordered liberty, in love of home, and in passion for beauty, Tennyson is the central figure of the Victorian Age.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

From a mezzotint by T. A. Barlow, after the painting by Sir John E. Millais, made in 1881.

ROBERT BROWNING

From a portrait painted at Rome in 1859 by Field Talfourd.

BROWNING’S HOME, 1887-9

De Vere Gardens, Kensington, London, England.

Browning is not so broadly representative of the movement of the age. He gave dramatic expression to one aspect of its experience; but that aspect was of thrilling interest. Tennyson did not miss the significance of individual impulse; but he saw men in ordered ranks, in social relations. He felt and expressed the collective experience of his age. Browning felt and expressed the experience of individual souls, of “Paracelsus,” “Luria.” He is the interpreter of exceptional experiences and natures, of “Abt Vogler,” Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance Bishop.

He knew secrets of great and mean souls, of Pompilia and the Pope, of “Half Rome” and Caponsacchi (kah´´-pahn-sock´-kee), in “The Ring and the Book,” of “The Patriot,” and of the husband of “The Last Duchess.” He was a psychologist of penetrating intelligence, and his passion for analysis and dealing with problems sometimes ran away with him, to use a colloquialism; hence the perplexities which beset the student of some of his work and the organization of clubs to interpret him.

THE PALACE IN VENICE WHERE BROWNING DIED

It was in this house, surrounded by all the beauties of Venice, that the poet breathed his last on December 12, 1889.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

From a portrait painted at Rome in 1859 by Field Talfourd.

Browning was often a very effective artist; but he was often very indifferent to form, and there are long productions of his which are intensely interesting but are not in any proper sense poetry. Time will separate the experiments in psychology from the achievements in art, and there will remain a body of poetry which appeals powerfully to men and women of intellectual interests and habits; a poetry notable for its reading of the secrets of individuality, its splendid optimism based on faith in the individual soul and in the purpose and power behind the universe, in the sense of freedom to take and use life daringly, in the impulse to action and spiritual venture, for its bold imagery and strong phrasing. Such poems as “Prospice,” “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” are not only impressive poetry, but have the note of the bugle in them.

MRS. BROWNING’S TOMB IN FLORENCE, ITALY

Elizabeth