published posthumously by Murray
in 1830, a year after the author's death.] [Footnote: "Progress of
Society." The phrase was becoming common; e.g. Russell's History
of Modern Europe (1822) has the sub-title A view of the Progress of
Society, etc. The didactic poem of Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil
Society (1796), a very dull performance, was quite unaffected by
the dreams of Priestley or Godwin. It was towards the middle of the
nineteenth century that Progress, without any qualifying phrase, came
into use.]

2.

We have been told by Tennyson that when he went by the first train
from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran in
grooves.

"Then I made this line:

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."
[Footnote: See Tennyson, Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p. 195.]

LOCKSLEY HALL, which was published in 1842, illustrates how the idea of
Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen. Though
subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem. The
pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of humanity,
the large excitement of living in a "wondrous Mother-age," dreams of the
future, quicken the passion of the hero's youth. His disappointment in
love disenchants him; he sees the reverse side of civilisation, but at
last he finds an anodyne for his palsied heart in a more sober version
of his earlier faith, a chastened belief in his Mother-age. He can at
least discern an increasing purpose in history, and can be sure that
"the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." The
novelty of the poem lay in finding a cathartic cure for a private
sorrow, not in religion or in nature, but in the modern idea of
Progress. It may be said to mark a stage in the career of the idea.

The view of civilisation which Tennyson took as his MOTIF had no
revolutionary implications, suggested no impatience or anger with the
past. The startling prospect unfolding itself before "the long result of
time," and history is justified by the promise of to-day:

The centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed.

Very different was the spirit in which another great poet composed,
nearly twenty years later, a wonderful hymn of Progress. Victor Hugo's
PLEIN CEIL, in his epic LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES,[Footnote: A.D. 1859.]
announces a new era of the world in which man, the triumphant rebel,
delivered from his past, will move freely forward on