This certainly is a new doctrine in poetry, but the message does not end here.  Law implies a source, a method, an object.  Tennyson, after facing his doubts honestly and manfully, finds law even in the sorrows and losses of humanity.  He gives this law an infinite and personal source, and finds the supreme purpose of all law to be a revelation of divine love.  All earthly love, therefore, becomes an image of the heavenly.  What first perhaps attracted readers to Tennyson, as to Shakespeare, was the character of his women,—­pure, gentle, refined beings, whom we must revere as our Anglo-Saxon forefathers revered the women they loved.  Like Browning, the poet had loved one good woman supremely, and her love made clear the meaning of all life.  The message goes one step farther.  Because law and love are in the world, faith is the only reasonable attitude toward life and death, even though we understand them not.  Such, in a few words, seems to be Tennyson’s whole message and philosophy.

If we attempt now to fix Tennyson’s permanent place in literature, as the result of his life and work, we must apply to him the same test that we applied to Milton and Wordsworth, and, indeed, to all our great poets, and ask with the German critics, “What new thing has he said to the world or even to his own country?” The answer is, frankly, that we do not yet know surely; that we are still too near Tennyson to judge him impersonally.  This much, however, is clear.  In a marvelously complex age, and amid a hundred great men, he was regarded as a leader.  For a full half century he was the voice of England, loved and honored as a man and a poet, not simply by a few discerning critics, but by a whole people that do not easily give their allegiance to any one man.  And that, for the present, is Tennyson’s sufficient eulogy.

ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)

    How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
    All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!

In this new song of David, from Browning’s Saul, we have a suggestion of the astonishing vigor and hope that characterize all the works of Browning, the one poet of the age who, after thirty years of continuous work, was finally recognized and placed beside Tennyson, and whom future ages may judge to be a greater poet,—­perhaps, even, the greatest in our literature since Shakespeare.

The chief difficulty in reading Browning is the obscurity of his style, which the critics of half a century ago held up to ridicule.  Their attitude towards the poet’s early work may be inferred from Tennyson’s humorous criticism of Sordello.  It may be remembered that the first line of this obscure poem is, “Who will may hear Sordello’s story told”; and that the last line is, “Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.”  Tennyson remarked that these were the only lines in the whole poem that he understood, and that they were evidently both lies.  If we attempt to explain this obscurity, which puzzled Tennyson and many less friendly critics, we find that it has many sources.  First, the poet’s thought is often obscure, or else so extremely subtle that language expresses it imperfectly,—­