experience of life, he had
attained to Wordsworth's spiritual insight and to Byron's power of
passion and understanding, he would have become a greater poet than
either. For he had a style--a "natural magic"--which only needed the
chastening touch of a finer culture to make it superior to any thing in
modern English poetry and to force us back to Milton or Shakspere for a
comparison. His tombstone, not far from Shelley's, bears the inscription
of his own choosing: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But
it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in large
characters on most of our contemporary poetry. "Wordsworth," says
Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their
forms." And he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount
which he left, or to his intellectual range, by virtue of the exquisite
quality of his technique.

1. Wordsworth's Poems. Chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. London,
1879.

2. Poetry of Byron. Chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold. London, 1881.

{265}

3. Shelley. Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Lyrical
Pieces.

4. Landor. Pericles and Aspasia.

5. Coleridge. Table Talk, Notes on Shakspere, The Ancient Mariner,
Christabel, Love, Ode to France, Ode to the Departing Year, Kubla Khan,
Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, Youth and Age, Frost at
Midnight.

6. De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Flight of a Tartar
Tribe, Biographical Sketches.

7. Scott. Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Bride of Lammermoor, Rob Roy,
Antiquary, Marmion, Lady of the Lake.

8. Keats. Hyperion, Eve of St. Agnes, Lyrical Pieces.

9. Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England, 18th-19th Centuries.

{266}

CHAPTER VIII.

FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME.

1832-1886.

The literature of the past fifty years is too close to our eyes to
enable the critic to pronounce a final judgment, or the literary
historian to get a true perspective. Many of the principal writers of
the time are still living, and many others have been dead but a few
years. This concluding chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the
consideration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, as the leaders
of literary thought, and who seem likely, under all future changes of
fashion and taste, to remain representative of their generation. As
regards _form_, the most striking fact in the history of the