WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 393 



The case is different with the literature of this century, for 

 reasons which can be stated. In the first place, our poets 

 have mostly been men leading a solitary life, in close con- 

 nection with nature, withdrawn from the busy hum of 

 populous cities. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, 

 Tennyson, Rossetti : it is clear, by only mentioning the leading 

 poets of our age, that this is the fact ; and to enlarge the list 

 would be to prove the point superfluously. Unlike the writers 

 of the Restoration and Queen Anne's reign, Victorian poets 

 have not breathed the atmosphere of society, the town, the 

 coffee-house. Even if they lived in London, the town, the 

 coffee-house, society had ceased to exist for them. Unlike 

 the writers of Elizabeth's and James's reigns, they have not 

 had the theatre, with its paramount interest in human action 

 and passion, its vast and varied audience, to concentrate their 

 gaze on man. And while circumstance divided them in this 

 way from what Pope called ' the proper study of mankind,' 

 the special forms of poetry they cultivated idyllic and con- 

 templative verse, lyric in its extended sense, descriptive and 

 reflective led them perforce to nature as a source of inspira- 

 tion. They worked, moreover, through a period in which the 

 sister art of painting devoted herself continually more and 

 more to the delineation of the outer world in landscape. 

 And this brings us to the decisive difference, the deep and 

 underlying reason why external nature has exercised so 

 powerful and penetrative an influence over contemporary 

 poetry. What we call science, that main energy of the age, 

 which has sapped old systems of thought, and is creating a 

 new basis for religion, forces man to regard himself as part 

 and parcel of the universe. He is no longer merely in it, 

 moving through it, viewing it and turning it round, as Sir 

 Thomas Browne delightfully said, for his recreation. He 

 knows himself to be, in a deep and serious sense, of it, 

 obedient to the elements, owning allegiance to the sun. 



Even the poets of the beginning of the century, who , 

 resented the impact of science most even Keats, who cried : 



Do not all charms fly 



At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? 



