(1) They exploited the aesthetic values to be had by knowledge.  They pursued erudition and built their poetry upon erudition, not in the didactic way of the Augustans, but as a mine of poetic material and suggestion.  Far more truly than Wordsworth’s this poetry could claim to be the impassioned expression which is in the face of science; for Wordsworth’s knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from erudition; his celandine, his White Doe, belong to no fauna or flora.  When Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, paints the albatross of the southern sea or the condor of the Andes, the eye of a passionate explorer and observer has gone to the making of their exotic sublimity.  The strange regions of humanity, too, newly disclosed by comparative religion and mythology, he explores with cosmopolitan impartiality and imaginative penetration; carving, as in marble, the tragedy of Hjalmar’s heart and Angentyr’s sword, of Cain’s doom, and Erinnyes never, like those of Aeschylus, appeased.  The Romantics had loved to play with exotic suggestions; but the East of Hugo’s Orientales or Moore’s Lalla Rookh is merely a veneer; the poet of Qain has heard the wild asses cry and seen the Syrian sun descend into the golden foam.

In the three commanding poets of our English mid-century, learning becomes no less evidently poetry’s honoured and indispensable ally.  Tennyson studies nature like a naturalist, not like a mystic, and finds felicities of phrase poised, as it were, upon delicate observation.  Man, too, in Browning, loses the vague aureole of Shelleyan humanity, and becomes the Italian of the Renascence or the Arab doctor or the German musician, all alive but in their habits as they lived, and fashioned in a brain fed, like no other, on the Book of the histories of Souls.  Matthew Arnold more distinctively than either, and both for better and for worse, was the scholar-poet; among other things he was, with Heredia and Carducci, a master of the poetry of critical portraiture, which focusses in a few lines (Sophocles, Rahel, Heine, Obermann Once More) the meaning of a great career or of a complex age.

(2) In the elaboration of their vision of beauty from these enlarged sources, Leconte de Lisle and his followers demanded an impeccable artistry.  ‘A great poet’, he said, ’and a flawless artist are convertible terms.’  The Parnassian precision rested on the postulate that, with sufficient resources of vocabulary and phrase, everything can be adequately expressed, the analogue of the contemporary scientific conviction that, with sufficient resources of experiment and calculation, everything can be exhaustively explained.  The pursuit of an objective calm, the repudiation of missionary ardour, of personal emotion, of the cri du coeur, of individual originality, involved the surrender of some of the glories of spontaneous song, but opened the way, for consummate artists such as these, to a profusion of