We have chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, these four writers—­Mrs. Browning, D. G. Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne—­as representative of the minor poets of the age; but there are many others who are worthy of study,—­Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold,[239] who are often called the poets of skepticism, but who in reality represent a reverent seeking for truth through reason and human experience; Frederick William Faber, the Catholic mystic, author of some exquisite hymns; and the scholarly John Keble, author of The Christian Year, our best known book of devotional verse; and among the women poets, Adelaide Procter, Jean Ingelow, and Christina Rossetti, each of whom had a large, admiring circle of readers.  It would be a hopeless task at the present time to inquire into the relative merits of all these minor poets.  We note only their careful workmanship and exquisite melody, their wide range of thought and feeling, their eager search for truth, each in his own way, and especially the note of freshness and vitality which they have given to English poetry.

II.  THE NOVELISTS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)

When we consider Dickens’s life and work, in comparison with that of the two great poets we have been studying, the contrast is startling.  While Tennyson and Browning were being educated for the life of literature, and shielded most tenderly from the hardships of the world, Dickens, a poor, obscure, and suffering child, was helping to support a shiftless family by pasting labels on blacking bottles, sleeping under a counter like a homeless cat, and once a week timidly approaching the big prison where his father was confined for debt.  In 1836 his Pickwick was published, and life was changed as if a magician had waved his wand over him.  While the two great poets were slowly struggling for recognition, Dickens, with plenty of money and too much fame, was the acknowledged literary hero of England, the idol of immense audiences which gathered to applaud him wherever he appeared.  And there is also this striking contrast between the novelist and the poets,—­that while the whole tendency of the age was toward realism, away from the extremes of the romanticists and from the oddities and absurdities of the early novel writers, it was precisely by emphasizing oddities and absurdities, by making caricatures rather than characters, that Dickens first achieved his popularity.

LIFE.  In Dickens’s early life we see a stern but unrecognized preparation for the work that he was to do.  Never was there a better illustration of the fact that a boy’s early hardship and suffering are sometimes only divine messengers disguised, and that circumstances which seem only evil are often the source of a man’s strength and of the influence which he is to wield in the world.  He was the second of eight poor children, and was born at Landport