happened to-morrow. They named their books by cold titles suggesting
straight corridors of marble--titles like _Looking Backward_. But Morris
was an artist as well as an anarchist. _News from Nowhere_ is an
irresponsible title; and it is an irresponsible book. It does not
describe the problem solved; it does not describe wealth either wielded
by the State or divided equally among the citizens. It simply describes
an undiscovered country where every one feels good-natured all day. That
he could even dream so is his true dignity as a poet. He was the first
of the AEsthetes to smell mediaevalism as a smell of the morning; and not
as a mere scent of decay.

With him the poetry that had been peculiarly Victorian practically
ends; and, on the whole, it is a happy ending. There are many other
minor names of major importance; but for one reason or other they do not
derive from the schools that had dominated this epoch as such. Thus
Thompson, the author of _The City of Dreadful Night_, was a fine poet;
but his pessimism combined with a close pugnacity does not follow any of
the large but loose lines of the Swinburnian age. But he was a great
person--he knew how to be democratic in the dark. Thus Coventry Patmore
was a much greater person. He was bursting with ideas, like
Browning--and truer ideas as a rule. He was as eccentric and florid and
Elizabethan as Browning; and often in moods and metres that even
Browning was never wild enough to think of. No one will ever forget the
first time he read Patmore's hint that the cosmos is a thing that God
made huge only "to make dirt cheap"; just as nobody will ever forget the
sudden shout he uttered when he first heard Mrs. Todgers asked for the
rough outline of a wooden leg. These things are not jokes, but
discoveries. But the very fact that Patmore was, as it were, the
Catholic Browning, keeps him out of the Victorian atmosphere as such.
The Victorian English simply thought him an indecent sentimentalist, as
they did all the hot and humble religious diarists of Italy or Spain.
Something of the same fate followed the most powerful of that last
Victorian group who were called "Minor Poets." They numbered many other
fine artists: notably Mr. William Watson, who is truly Victorian in that
he made a manly attempt to tread down the decadents and return to the
right reason of Wordsworth--

"I have not paid the world
The evil and the insolent courtesy
Of offering it my basene