WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 395 



grasp. What has been called the cosmic enthusiasm is too 

 undefined as yet, too unmanageable, too pregnant with anxious 

 and agitating surmise, to find free utterance in emotional 

 literature. In our days science is more vitally poetical than 

 art ; it opens wider horizons and excites the spirit more than 

 verse can do. Where are the fictions of the fancy compared 

 with the vistas revealed by astronomers, biologists, physicists, 

 geologists ? Yet signs are not wanting I see them in some 

 of the shorter poems of Lord Tennyson, I see them in the 

 great neglected work of Roden Noel, I see them in the 

 fugitive attempts of many lesser men than these which 

 justify a sober critic in predicting that our century's enthusiasm 

 for nature is but the prelude to a more majestic poetry, 

 combining truth with faith and fact with imagination, than 

 the world has ever known. 



X 



It will have been noticed that in this essay the terms 

 Elizabethan and Victorian are used with considerable laxity. 

 The object is to define two periods of English literature, the 

 one extending from Wyatt to Milton, or, roughly speaking, 

 from the year 1530 to the year 1650, the other covering the 

 whole of the nineteenth century, and dating from the publica- 

 tion of Walter Savage Landor's ' Gebir.' These two periods 

 are divided by a space of a hundred and fifty years, during 

 which our literature developed upon lines divergent from the 

 course taken by the Renaissance of the sixteenth century. 

 I have contended that Victorian literature is marked by a 

 reaction in favour of Elizabethanism, and that the general 

 scope and tone of poetry in these periods are closely similar. 



Form is a matter of such prominence in art that I shall 

 perhaps be excused for recapitulating some points upon this 

 topic. During the Restoration and Queen Anne's reign, 

 versifiers lost the power and liking for that English unrhymed 

 iambic, which began with Marlowe and culminated with 

 Milton. They dropped the use of lyric measures, rarely 

 employed the sestine or the octave or the Spenserian stanza, 

 and so utterly neglected the sonnet, that even a poet of Gray's 



