Milton, Shelley, and Tennyson. Clough was a serious poet, and caught many of the fleeting aspects of nature and fixed them in his verse. Doubtless his The New Decalogue, a highly satirical poem, is the best known of his poems. It is an excellent prod to the smug citizen of our time, so careless in matters of religion. He wrote nothing better, however, than these lines,

While the tired waves, vainly breaking

Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back, through creeks and inlets making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

Another work of his which is filled with fine and thoughtful verse is The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.

Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market is best described as "pretty," though the fantastic nature of its material has puzzled many into thinking it more thoughtful than it really is. But her sonnets under the title of Monna Innominata, fourteen in number, are very beautiful. Simple, fine, delicate, perfect in their ease and in the clearness with which they reach the reader's mind, one does not hesitate to call them unsurpassed in the rapidity with which one may read them and feel that he knows at every line precisely what is said and meant. They have a spontaneous flow, a quickness of movement, refreshing to one who gives much time to the study of the sonnet, for from the pens of most poets the sonnet has seemed a most labored product. Her sonnets are not filled with profound thought, nor with overwhelming emotion; but for beautifully pure style they are irresistible.

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William Morris, along with Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and D. G. Rossetti, was a pre-Raphaelite, that is, one of a group artists who tried to work as did the painters of Italy in the four

teenth century, the century just prior to the one in which Raphael lived and wrought. They tried closely to copy nature. Morris was as much a prophet of socialism as Herbert Spencer was a denouncer of the slavery which he predicted the socialists would bring upon mankind, and he was a poet of no mean order. His The Life and Death of Jason did what few long epics in English have succeeded in doing, secured a wide reading audience, though the work is now considered not equal to The Earthly Paradise, a book which contains twelve narratives of classical origin and twelve of romantic. His Sigurd the Volsung is a grand version of an old Teutonic legend.

In America. A word only must suffice for the leading American poets, even important as they are. They are entirely worthy of full and separate handling and study from that given in a history covering English literature as a whole. Longfellow was the bringer of the old world's culture to the new. Emerson was a most sincere but usually rather unmusical singer of his own philosophic moods and of a few common experiences that belong to all of us. Lowell was a better poet than he reckoned himself to be, but, after all, was too much a man of affairs, too much engaged in matters other than literary, to write many excellent verses. Holmes was America's best writer of occasional verse. Whittier was an even more practical poet than Lowell, giving his life chiefly to combating the evils of slavery, and yet very successful in pure poetry. Poe was the master in sheer music. Whitman wrote much that it is difficult for the normal human being to consider poetry, and yet he is acknowledged by all to have produced three or four poems worthy of comparison with anything written by any American. And Lanier, with Corn, Ballad of Trees and the Master, and The Marshes of Glynn, if he has not yet come into his own due meed of praise, will not fail to do so in time.

2. Major Poets

Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Mrs. Browning remain of the Victorian poets to be considered in this chapter. Tennyson and those who wrote chiefly under his influence have been spoken of as the Idyllic school; Browning and those he inspired, including Mrs. Browning, as the Psychological school; Rossetti and Swinburne as members of the pre-Raphaelite group; and Arnold and Swinburne as members of the Renaissance group in the nineteenth century. It will thus be seen that Swinburne, being in two groups, has the distinction of not being easy to classify.

The lesser four of the major poets. It will be simpler for us to consider Rossetti, Swinburne, Mrs. Browning, and Arnold before the greater poets, even though the two greater began their work earlier than these four.

John Ruskin had highly praised the decorative qualities of medieval art, accuracy in copying nature in all art, strictness of line, and strength in color, and had maintained that things reproduced in art should be reproduced in all details for their truth rather than for what most men would call their beauty. The two Rossettis, William Morris to some extent, and Swinburne also, were much taken with these teachings of Ruskin, and gave themselves to the study of medieval life and culture, being attracted particularly by the painters coming before Raphael. They became greatly interested in the medieval ways of doing things, and undertook to make the same and similar patterns in their work of painting; this they carried over into poetry. Poetry with them was a pattern to be woven after the fashion of the forms of nature, with all of her loving fidelity in treatment of detail, with all of her delicacy, all her strength, and all her riot of color. Christina Rossetti's work has al