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a more admirable, man in every relation never lived. He was one of the noblest and most perfect characters I have ever known, and I have known him sixty years," wrote Lord Coleridge. "Certain it is that Mr. Arnold's superiority of mien gave offense in some directions, appearing to be regarded as a kind of involuntary criticism. In addition to this, his lofty mental attitude and gravity of demeanor were by some felt to be oppressive, and were misconstrued as pride. Yet proud, in a narrow and selfish sense, Arnold was not. His nature, full of dignity, was yet gentle and singularly sweet, and his interest in the masses was sympathetic and sincere," wrote Florence Earl Coates.

Arnold's end came suddenly and with no warning. His general health had always been good, though his physicians had warned him of hereditary weakness of the heart. April 15, 1888, he was at Liverpool with his wife, planning to meet his daughter as she landed from the steamer. He ran to catch a car, the exertion brought on heart failure, and he died at once.

Arnold never gave in his poetry the impression of being divinely inspired to write. In all his poetical work we can find nothing hastily thrown off in the heat of emotion. He was not endowed with that fine frenzy of which we hear so much. And yet, the quiet, calm, restrained poetry appeals to us. The dignity of the man, the highly cultivated soul of him, shows through the clear direct verse. His poetry is academic, it is true, it smells of the lamp, but it still has a charm. The refinement of language, the subtlety and discrimination of taste, the perfection of form, the reflective spirit, all combine to insure for Matthew Arnold a certain immortality in the minds of lovers of poetry.

ALFRED TENNYSON

It is safe to prophesy that in the perspective of the history of English poetry Tennyson will stand out above his contemporaries as the representative poet of his age. His life compasses all but a few years of the nineteenth century; his work has appealed not to a clique or a restricted circle, but to all classes of readers; his ideals, feelings, and instincts are, more than those of any other poet of the century, typical of the conventional gentleman of his time. New and startling ideas or expressions we seldom find in Tennyson, but we do find a full expression of the mental, emotional, and spiritual life of his contemporaries.

The incidents of his life are in no way sensational. He was always a quiet, retiring man, deeply devoted to his family, and, even in the days of his greatest fame, sincerely desirous of avoiding attention. He has been called unsocial, perhaps because he shunned notoriety. When his house had become the mecca of enthusiasts, he preferred to flee to the secluded parts of his land to escape their attention. He used to show to a favored few the tree overhanging his garden which Americans climbed to get a glimpse of him in his walks. He was in a rage at girls who sought his autographs. And yet, friend after friend has testified to the genial cordiality and simplicity of his conversation among his intimates. He got along splendidly with crusty Carlyle, he was devoted to FitzGerald, and his In Memoriam reveals better than any words car describe the positive passion of friendship of which he was capable.

Alfred Tennyson, the fourth of the twelve children of the Reverend George Tennyson, was born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, August 6, 1809. His father was rector of the parish, a man of more than usual ability, a linguist, with some talent in poetry, in painting, and in music. His mother, Elizabeth Fytche, the daughter of a clergyman, was noted about the countryside for her kindness of heart: “The wicked inhabitants of a neighboring village used to bring their dogs to her windows and beat them in order to be bribed to leave off by the gentle lady, or to make advantageous bargains by selling her the worthless curs."

The family life was unusually happy. The twelve children grew up in this remote village and invented for themselves romantic games. "The boys played great games, like Arthur's knights; they were champions and warriors defending a stone heap; or, again, they would set up opposing camps with a king in the midst of each. . . . When dinner-time came, and they all sat around the

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table, each in turn put a chapter of his history underneath the potato-bowl, long endless histories, chapter after chapter, diffuse, absorbing, unending, as are the stories of real life of which each sunrise opens on a new part." 1

Tennyson's education was begun at Louth Grammar School, where he remained five years between 1815 and 1820, and continued under his father's tuition at Somersby until he was ready for college. His school life at Louth was always a black remembrance to him, "How I did hate that school," he once said later, — but his years at home were peculiarly valuable. Not only did he profit by his father's direction of his studies, but by his access to the large, wellselected library and by the leisure to indulge his tastes. He had already shown a bent for poetry. His juvenile poems reveal an unusual excellence. In 1827, while he was still studying at home, a little volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers contained the verse of Alfred and Charles Tennyson. The poems were brought out anonymously and received little attention.

In February of 1828 the "Two Brothers" matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge. At first shy and without friends, they gradually became intimate with a little group of their fellows, including Richard Trench (later Archbishop of Dublin), James Spedding, Edward FitzGerald, Frederick Maurice (later the great liberal preacher), and Arthur Hallam. Alfred was looked upon already by these friends as a young poet of promise. In 1829 he won the Chancellor's prize medal by a poem entitled Timbuctoo, the first instance of the winning of this prize by a poem in blank verse. A year later he published a volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, which revealed by such lyrics as Mariana, The Poet, Oriana a mastery of melody and sincere love of beauty through occasional crudities of metrical construction (as in Madeline and Adeline).

A peculiar break in Tennyson's life was his enlistment (1830) with Hallam in the cause of the Spanish insurgents under Torrijos. His short campaign in Spain, unrelieved by the excitement of meeting an enemy, left upon him a lasting love for the Pyrenees. In the valley of Canterety he wrote part of the supremely beautiful Enone.

In 1831, Tennyson, at the news of his father's serious illness, left Cambridge without taking his degree and returned to Somersby. A few days after his return his father died. The Tennysons continued to live at the rectory, however, for six years more, Alfred remaining there absorbed in his work. At the end of 1832 appeared his new volume, simply entitled Poems, containing a number of the lyrical masterpieces, as The Lady of Shalott, Enone, and The Lotos Eaters, upon which Tennyson's fame rests. In this volume the true poet was at his best. Unhappily his genius was not recognized by the reviewers and he suffered, as had so many of his predecessors, from a savage attack in the Quarterly. Tennyson, always acutely sensitive to adverse criticism, was literally overwhelmed and, had it not been for the entreaties of his friends, might indeed have abandoned poetry entirely. For ten years thereafter he published nothing.

A great sorrow came to Tennyson in September of 1833 by the sudden death of Arthur Hallam. Combined with the Quarterly attack, this loss affected his health. He lost much of the robust strength which had been his and retired more and more into the seclusion of his own thoughts. He tried to grow hardened and indifferent to popular fame, and devoted himself heart and soul to the perfection of his poetry. In the next few years he wrote some of his finest verse and meditated long over the beginnings of In Memoriam and Idylls of the King.

Tennyson's popular fame dates from the two-volume edition of Poems with which in 1842 he broke his ten-years' silence. Together with many of his former lyrics revised, this collection included a number of the popular studies of English home-life, as The Gardener's Daughter and The Lord of Burleigh, as well as a more enduring class of poems like Ulysses, Locksley Hall, Sir Galahad, and Morte d'Arthur. The poems took the fancy of all classes, and Tennyson received what his son has called a "chorus of favorable reviews." The effect of his success upon Tennyson himself was immeasurable. Although his finances were low and his hopes of gaining a sufficient livelihood by his poems still might seem small, all idea of doing anything else was henceforth out of the question. The applause of the multitude and of the critics, however much

1 Mrs. Ritchie, Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning.

he may have thought he had steeled himself to indifference, reacted most favorably upon him.

The 1842 volume won for him the friendship of those few rare souls with whom he was best fitted to commune. His old friends, Spedding, Trench, Milnes, and the rest always continued his friends, but he became well known in a wider circle. "I saw Tennyson, when I was in London, several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world still better things," wrote Wordsworth in 1845. And Carlyle testified his admiration and devotion: in a letter to Emerson in 1844 he wrote: "Alfred is one of the few British or Foreign Figures (a not increasing number I think!) who are and remain beautiful to me; — a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, Brother!... One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; brightlaughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic, — fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe.”

By an unhappy investment Tennyson was reduced to poverty a few years after his 1842 volume had won such general recognition of worth, but this poverty was relieved in 1845 by a government pension of two hundred pounds a year. After that time his poetry, too, began to bring him in a moderate income, so that thenceforth the poet, though never a very wealthy man, was without financial worries.

In 1850 he married Emily Sellwood, to whom he had been long engaged. The alliance was ideally happy: "The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I married her," he said long afterwards. Tennyson's son bears witness to her loving devotion to her husband: “It was she who became my father's adviser in literary matters. 'I am proud of her intellect,' he wrote. With her he always discussed what he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her, and to no one else, he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her 'tender spiritual nature' and instinctive nobility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor."

In November of 1850, after the death of Wordsworth, Tennyson's position in contemporary poetry was recognized by his appointment to the laureateship. It is said that Lord Russell submitted to the queen the names of Professor Wilson, Henry Taylor, Sheridan Knowles, and Tennyson, and that Victoria was influenced in her choice of Tennyson by the admiration which the prince consort expressed for In Memoriam. In view of the subsequent fame of the various candidates, any other choice would have seemed absurd. Tennyson himself complained that his accession brought upon him "such shoals of poems that I am almost crazed with them; the twe hundred million poets of Great Britain deluge me daily. Truly the Laureateship is no sinecure.” Outside of the publication of his successive volumes of poems his subsequent years of life were without noteworthy incident. In 1851 he made a trip to Italy and in 1853 he leased a little hous and farm called Farringford, near the town of Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight. Later he bought this property, where he lived quietly for fourteen years. His constantly growing fame attracted such crowds of sight-seers that in 1867 he reluctantly left Farringford for a little estate near Haslemere where he built a country house called Aldworth. He was offered a baronetcy by Gladstone in 1873 and by Disraeli in 1874, but it was not until ten years later that he was prevailed upon to accept the honor - "For my own part," said he, "I shall regret my simple name all my life." March 11, 1884, he took his seat in the House of Lords as the first Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Farringford. His health began to fail in his eighty-fourth year, although his mind remained clear to the end. He died peacefully at his home, Aldworth, October 6, 1892. He was buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey, October 12.

During these many years without noteworthy incident, his poetic faculty had been continuously exerted. A mere record of his productions will serve to show his industry and the high quality of his work: The Princess (1847); In Memoriam (1850); Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852); Maud and Other Poems (1855); 2d edition revised and enlarged (1856); Idylls

of the King, including Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere (1859); Enoch Arden (1864); four nore of the Idylls, The Coming of Arthur, Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettare, and The Passing of Arthur (1869); the drama Queen Mary (1875); the drama Harold (1877); the two-act tragedy The Cup (1881); the drama The Promise of May (1882); Becket and Tiresias and Other Poems (1885); Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886); Demeter and Other Poems (1889); The Foresters, 3 romantic play (1892). He was during the year of his death engaged upon poetic work which was published posthumously, The Death of Enone, Akbar's Dream, and Other Poems.

ROBERT BROWNING

"I HAD no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than if he were an ordinary man," wrote Benjamin Jowett, after meeting Browning, and Jowett's testimony to the sanity and the sociability of Browning is borne out by many other of his contemporaries. Browning was said to be the most captivating conversationalist in Europe; “But,” said Mr. Freeman, “if a man can talk to be understood, why can't he write to be understood?" Freeman goes on to say that he found Browning much like other men, whereas he "had thought that his Comitatus, the Browning Society, would follow him everywhere to explain what he said." Few poets present such a puzzling personality as Browning. Simple, genial, social, virile, and happy, as a man, even in his lifetime he had the doubtful compliment of a society formed for the sole purpose of studying and interpreting his poetry. As Dr. Johnson would, according to Goldsmith, have made little fishes talk like whales, so Browning, when he took pen in hand, seemed to lose the power of simple, direct expression. Yet, through the undoubted difficulties of his verse, the greatness of the poet has won a wider and wider circle of readers with the passing of the years. Robert Browning was born at Camberwell, a suburb of London, May 7, 1812. His father, Robert Browning, was for fifty years a clerk in the consols dividend room of the Bank of England. By frugality he accumulated a moderate fortune with which he indulged a rare taste in literature and art, having a library of more than six thousand volumes and a modest collection of prints. The poet's mother, Sarah Anne Wiedemann, was the daughter of William Wiedemann, a shipowner of a German family which had originally come from Hamburg and settled in Dundee, Scotland. Carlyle once spoke of her as "the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman,” and Browning himself wrote, "She was a divine woman."

As a youth Browning was left unusual freedom to follow his own inclinations. After receiving the rudiments of an education in a Peckham school near by until he was fourteen years old, he had no further regular school training. For a few years he had a tutor in French, and at the age of eighteen he attended some lectures in Greek at London University, but his acquisitive mind found plenty of occupation in his father's well-chosen library and plenty of occupation in scribbling verses to be carefully scrutinized and criticized by his father. He was a restless, nervous, vigorous, somewhat self-willed youth, but not at all inclined to disabuse the liberty allowed him at home. "It would have been quite unpardonable in my case," he wrote in after years, "not to have done my best. My dear father put me in a condition most favourable for the best work I was capable of. When I think of the many authors who have had to fight their way through all sorts of difficulties, I have no reason to be proud of my achievement. My father secured for me all the ease and comfort which a literary man needs to do good work." The only signs of precocity shown by Browning in his youth were his love for reading and his love for poetry, especially for writing poetry. In his reading he was especially fond of Quarles's Emblems, Walpole's Letters, the Letters of Junius, the works of the great Elizabethans, and Voltaire. Of modern poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats were his favorites at first. At the age of twelve he gathered a number of his short poems into a volume called the Incondita, but was unable to find a publisher. His own first published poem was Pauline, issued anonymously in 1833 when he was twenty-one years old. This poem showed markedly the influence of Shelley.

In later years Browning regretted the publication of Pauline, tried to destroy all copies of it, and only consented to its republication in his collected poems when he realized that otherwise pirated editions would appear.

He had before this time definitely centered this ambitions upon a poetical career, declining to consider a business or professional training. Again we must pay tribute to the wisdom of his father who not only did not thwart his ambitions but encouraged them. The father's aid made travel and experience possible for the poet at a time when these were most essential for his mental and spiritual development. In the winter of 1833 he visited in St. Petersburg, and in the spring of 1834 he made his first trip to Italy, staying at Venice and Asolo. He was writing all the time during these months. Certain of his dramatic lyrics — notably Johannes Agricola and Porphyria's Lover appeared during 1834 in a magazine, and his first great dramatic poem, Paracelsus, in book form over his own name in 1835. Upon its appearance John Forster, in an article entitled "Evidences of a New Genius for Dramatic Poetry," heralded Browning as worthy to rank with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth: "He has entitled himself to a place among the acknowledged poets of the age," but Paracelsus did not gain a wide popularity. We find in the poem the subtle analysis of character and motive and the passages of lyric beauty and power which distinguish the best of his later work, but his subject was too far removed from the familiar knowledge of his own time and the style was not calculated to attract the general reader. Its moderate success enlarged his acquaintance among a select circle of literary men, however, so that he met such men as Horne, Hunt, Carlyle, Forster, Macready, Talfourd, Dickens, Wordsworth, and Landor. And it is interesting to read in Harriet Martineau's Autobiography: "Mr. Macready put Paracelsus into my hand, when I was staying at his house; and I read a canto before going to bed. For the first time in my life, I passed a whole night without sleeping a wink."

For one of these new friends, the famous actor and manager Macready, Browning undertook his next literary work, the play Strafford. This was produced in 1837 with fair success. Browning was encouraged to try his hand at the drama again, producing King Victor and King Charles (1842), The Return of the Druses and A Blot in the 'Scutheon (1843), Colombe's Birthday (1844), Luria and A Soul's Tragedy (1846). His writing of dramas ceased, however, after an unfortunate quarrel with Macready over the performance of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon in 1843, and after the merely moderate success of his plays. Truth to say, the stage was not the proper medium for Browning's genius. Although the plays have occasional clear and forcible situations and abound in passages of high poetic merit, the long and intricate analyses of morals and motives are too apt to weary the average audience.

After the publication of Paracelsus in 1835 and the favorable comment excited by his play Strafford, two years later, Browning was well on the way to literary eminence, but his friends and admirers were confounded by the publication in 1840 of his Sordello. The tales of its effect upon its contemporaries illustrate humorously the difficulties which remain until the present day. Tennyson remarked that he understood only the first and last lines, - "Who will, may hear Sordello's story told," and "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told,” — and they were both lies. Harriet Martineau wrote: "The unbounded expectation I formed from that poem [Paracelsus] was sadly disappointed when Sordello came out. I was so wholly unable to understand it that I supposed myself ill." Douglas Jerrold, convalescing from an illness, tried to read it; a few lines alarmed him; "sentence after sentence brought no constructive thought to his brain. . . . The perspiration rolled from his forehead, and smiting his head, he sat down on his sofa, crying, 'O God, I am an idiot!"" The obscurity of Sordello is due largely to the ruthless excision of connectives and the consequent jamming together of the main words of the thought. The reader's attention is too severely tasked to fill the gaps which occur in the grammatical constructions page after page. The undoubted beauties of many passages are lost by the great difficulty of following consecutively the story of the poem. Browning in his poetry, we can say thankfully, never again approached the obscurity in Sordello.

His next poetical works appeared in a series of cheap pamphlets between 1841 and 1846

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