“To find its meaning is my meat and drink.”

Browning advanced into new fields, while Tennyson was more content to make a beautiful poetic translation of much of the thought of the age.  In his youth he wrote:—­

  “Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime
  With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time.”

From merely reading Tennyson’s verse, one could gauge quite accurately the trend of Victorian scientific thought.

The poetry of both Browning and Tennyson is so resonant with faith that they have been called great religious teachers.  Rudyard Kipling, the poet of imperialistic England, of her “far-flung battle line,” attributes her “dominion over palm and pine” to faith in the “Lord God of Hosts.”

In the minor poets, there is often a different strain.  Arnold is beset with doubt, and hears no “clear call,” such as Tennyson voices in Crossing the Bar.  Swinburne, seeing the pessimistic side of the shield of evolution, exclaims:—­

  “Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), Oxford tutor, traveler, and educational examiner, was a poet who struggled with the doubt of the age.  He loved—­

  “To finger idly some old Gordian knot,
  Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave,
  And with much toil attain to half-believe.”

His verse would be forgotten if it expressed only such an uncertain note; but his greatest poem thus records his belief in the value of life’s struggle and gives a hint of final victory:—­

  “Say not the struggle naught availeth,
  The labor and the wounds are vain,
  The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
    And as things have been they remain.

  “If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
      It maybe, in yon smoke concealed,
  Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
      And, but for you, possess the field.”

Although he paid too little attention to the form of his verse, some of his poems have the vitality of an earnest, thoughtful sincerity.

Two poets, W. E. Henley (1849-1903) and Robert Bridges (1844- ), although they do not possess Robert Browning’s genius, yet have much of his capacity to inspire others with joy in “the mere living.”  Henley, a cripple and a great sufferer, was a poet, critic, and London editor.  His message is “the joy of life “:—­

  “...the blackbird sings but a box-wood flute,
  But I lose him best of all
  For his song is all of the joy of life.”

His verse, which is elemental, full of enthusiasm and beauty, often reminds us of the work of the thirteenth-century lyrists.

Robert Bridges, an Oxford graduate, physician, critic, and poet, also had for his creed:  “Life and joy are one.”  His universe, like Shelley’s, is an incarnation of the spirit of love:—­

  “Love can tell, and love alone,
  Whence the million stars were strewn,
  Why each atom knows its own,
  How, in spite of woe and death,
  Gay is life, and sweet is breath.”