Be it understood that the romantic ballad only is here in question, in which the poet of a literary age seeks to catch and reproduce the tone of a childlike, unself-conscious time, so that his art has almost inevitably something artificial or imitative.  Here and there one stands out from the mass by its skill or luck in overcoming the difficulty.  There is Hawker’s “Song of the Western Men,” which Macaulay and others quoted as historical, though only the refrain was old: 

  “And shall Trelawney die? 
  Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
  Will know the reason why!” [20]

There is Sydney Dobell’s “Keith of Ravelston,” [21] which haunts the memory with the insistent iteration of its refrain:—­

  “The murmur of the mourning ghost
    That keeps the shadowy kine;
  Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
    The sorrows of thy line!”

And again there is Robert Buchanan’s “Ballad of Judas Iscariot” which Mr. Stedman compares for “weird impressiveness and power” with “The Ancient Mariner.”  The mediaeval feeling is most successfully captured in this poem.  It recalls the old “Debate between the Body and Soul,” and still more the touches of divine compassion which soften the rigours of Catholic theology in the legends of the saints.  It strikes the keynote, too, of that most modern ballad mode which employs the narrative only to emphasize some thought of universal application.  There is salvation for all, is the thought, even for the blackest soul of the world, the soul that betrayed its Maker.[22] Such, though after a fashion more subtly intellectual, is the doctrinal use to which this popular form is put by one of the latest English ballad makers, Mr. John Davidson.  Read, e.g., his “Ballad of a Nun,” [23] the story of which was told in several shapes by the Spanish poet Alfonso the Learned (1226-84).  A runaway nun returns in penitence to her convent, and is met at the gate by the Virgin Mary, who has taken her likeness and kept her place for her during the years of her absence.  Or read “A New Ballad of Tannhaeuser,” [24] which contradicts “the idea of the inherent impurity of nature” by an interpretation of the legend in a sense quite the reverse of Wagner’s.  Tannhaeuser’s dead staff blossoms not as a sign of forgiveness, but to show him that “there was no need to be forgiven.”  The modern balladist attacks the ascetic Middle Age with a shaft from its own quiver.

But it is time to turn from minor poets to acknowledged masters; and above all to the greatest of modern English artists in verse, the representative poet of the Victorian era.  Is Tennyson to be classed with the romantics?  His workmanship, when most truly characteristic, is romantic in the sense of being pictorial and ornate, rather than classically simple or severe.  He assimilated the rich manner of Keats, whose influence is perceptible in his early poems.  His art, like Keats’, is eclectic and reminiscent, choosing