In truth, we have now both in prose and in verse strongly-contrasted types, each of which commands admiration and following.  Both in prose and verse we have one type which has carried subtle finish and a purism studied almost to the point of “preciousness,” alongside of another type which crowds its effects without regard to tone and harmony, and by its side a third type which trots along breathless in its shirt-sleeves.  Tennyson’s In Memoriam has that exquisite polish of workmanship which we find in such poets as Virgil, Racine, and Milton—­that perfection of phrase which we cannot conceive the poet capable of improving by any labour.  Put aside for the moment any question about the ideas, inspiration, or power of the poem as a whole, and consider that, in all those hundreds of stanzas, there is hardly one line that is either careless, prosaic, or harsh, not a single false note, nothing commonplace, nothing over-coloured, but uniform harmony of phrase.  This perfection of phrasing is not always to be found even in the greatest poets, for Aeschylus and Dante at times strike a fierce discord, and Shakespeare, Calderon, and Goethe sometimes pass into rank extravaganza.  But this scholarly and measured speech has impressed itself on the poetry of our time—­insomuch, that the Tennysonian cycle of minor poets has a higher standard of grace, precision, and subtlety of phrase than the second rank of any modern literature:—­a standard which puts to shame the rugosities of strong men like Dryden, Burns, and Byron.  There is plenty of mannerism in this school of our minor poetry, but no one can call it either slovenly or harsh.

The friend, contemporary, almost the rival of Tennyson, one whom some think endowed by nature with even stronger genius, on the other hand, struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times.  Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on him.  There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music.  But, whatever were Browning’s latent powers of melody, his method when he chose to play upon the gong, or the ancient instrument of marrow-bone and cleavers, was the exact antithesis of Tennyson’s; and he set on edge the teeth of those who love the exquisite cadences of In Memoriam and Maud.  Browning has left deep influence, if not a school.  The younger Lytton, George Meredith, Buchanan, here and there Swinburne and William Morris, seem to break loose from the graceful harmony which the Tennysonians affect, and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the uncouth, the ghastly, and the lurid.  No one denies originality and power in many of these pieces:  but they are flat blasphemy against the pellucid melody of the Tennysonian idyll.  Our poetry seems to be under two contrary spells:  it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing symmetry of Mozart; at another time it yearns for the crashing discords that thunder along the march of the Valkyrie through the air.