“She has lost me, I have gained her;
 Her soul’s mine and thus grown perfect,
 I shall pass my life’s remainder. 
 Life will just hold out the proving
 Both our powers, alone and blended: 
 And then come the next life quickly! 
 This world’s use will have been ended.”

It follows that the reward of effort is the promise of immortality, and that for each man, just because his thoughts and motives taken together count, and not one alone, there is infinite hope.

The contemporaries of Tennyson and Browning in poetry divide themselves into three separate schools.  Nearest to them in temper is the school of Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same quick sensitiveness to the intellectual tendencies of the age, but their foothold in a time of shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very different from the buoyant optimism of Browning, or Tennyson’s mixture of science and doubt and faith.  Very remote from them on the other hand is the backward-gazing mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who revived (Rossetti from Italian sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle age which neither Scott nor Coleridge had more than partially and brokenly understood.  The last school, that to which Swinburne and Meredith with all their differences unite in belonging, gave up Christianity with scarcely so much as a regret,

“We have said to the dream that caress’d and the dread that smote us, Good-night and good-bye.”

and turned with a new hope and exultation to the worship of our immemorial mother the earth.  In both of them, the note of enthusiasm for political liberty which had been lost in Wordsworth after 1815, and was too early extinguished with Shelley, was revived by the Italian Revolution in splendour and fire.

(3)

As one gets nearer one’s own time, a certain change comes insensibly over one’s literary studies.  Literature comes more and more to mean imaginative literature or writing about imaginative literature.  The mass of writing comes to be taken not as literature, but as argument or information; we consider it purely from the point of view of its subject matter.  A comparison will make this at once clear.  When a man reads Bacon, he commonly regards himself as engaged in the study of English literature; when he reads Darwin he is occupied in the study of natural science.  A reader of Bacon’s time would have looked on him as we look on Darwin now.

The distinction is obviously illogical, but a writer on English literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes his book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to last.  The main body of imaginative prose literature—­the novel—­is treated of in the next chapter