The New Poems make a volume of unusual importance in the history of poetical careers.  Mr Arnold lived more than twenty years after the date of their publication; but his poetical production during that time filled no more than a few pages.  At this date he was a man of forty-five—­an age at which the poetical impulse has been supposed to run low, but perhaps with no sufficient reason.  Poets of such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and later.  Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps his actually greatest volumes, Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two.  According to Mr Arnold’s own conception of poetry-making, as depending upon the subject and upon the just and artist-like exposition of that subject, no age should be too late.

Certainly this age was not too late with him.  The contents all answered strictly enough to their title, except that Empedocles on Etna and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning’s request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and that Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night, and the Grande Chartreuse had made magazine appearances.  Again the moment was most important.  When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting with an apology the “transient and embarrassed phantom” of Merope) an appearance in 1855, the transition age of English nineteenth-century poetry was in full force.  No one’s place was safe but Tennyson’s; and even his was denied by some, including Mr Arnold himself, who never got his eyes quite clear of scales in that matter.  Browning, though he had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had them allowed; the Spasmodics had not disappeared; the great prae-Raphaelite school was but on the way.  The critics knew not what to think; the vulgar thought (to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper.  Both classes, critic and public, rent Maud and neglected Men and Women:  The Defence of Guenevere had not yet rung the matins—­bell in the ears of the new generation.

Now things were all altered.  The mixture of popularity and perfection in the Idylls and the Enoch Arden volume—­the title poem and Aylmer’s Field for some, The Voyage and Tithonus and In the Valley of Cauterets for others—­had put Tennyson’s place

  “Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men.”

The three-volume collection of Browning’s Poems, and Dramatis Personae which followed to clench it, had nearly, if not quite, done the same for him. The Defence of Guenevere and The Life and Death of Jason, Atalanta, Chastelard, and most of all the Poems and Ballads, had launched an entirely new poetical school with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the world.  The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not