listeners; the Muses were also their visitants; but none of them
ventured seriously to dispute the royal summits where Browning and
Tennyson sat, and smiled at one another across the vale between.

Both began together; and the impulses which came to them from the new
and excited world which opened its fountains in and about 1832 continued
to impel them till the close of their lives. While the poetic world
altered around them, while two generations of poets made new schools of
poetry, they remained, for the most part, unaffected by these schools.
There is nothing of Arnold and Clough, of Swinburne, Rossetti or Morris,
or of any of the others, in Browning or Tennyson. There is nothing even
of Mrs. Browning in Browning. What changes took place in them were
wrought, first, by the natural growth of their own character; secondly,
by the natural development of their art-power; and thirdly, by the slow
decaying of that power. They were, in comparison with the rest,
curiously uninfluenced by the changes of the world around them. The main
themes, with which they began, they retained to the end. Their methods,
their instruments, their way of feeling into the world of man and of
nature, their relation to the doctrines of God and of Man, did not,
though on all these matters they held diverse views, alter with the
alteration of the world. But this is more true of Browning than of
Tennyson. The political and social events of those years touched
Tennyson, as we see from _Maud_ and the _Princess_, but his way of
looking at them was not the way of a contemporary. It might have been
predicted from his previous career and work. Then the new movements of
Science and Criticism which disturbed Clough and Arnold so deeply, also
troubled Tennyson, but not half so seriously. He staggered for a time
under the attack on his old conceptions, but he never yielded to it. He
was angry with himself for every doubt that beset him, and angry with
the Science and Criticism which disturbed the ancient ideas he was
determined not to change. Finally, he rested where he had been when he
wrote _In Memoriam_, nay more, where he had been when he began to write.

There were no such intervals in Browning's thought. One could scarcely
say from his poetry, except in a very few places, that he was aware of
the social changes of his time, or of the scientific and critical
movement which, while he lived, so profoundly modified both theology and
religion.[2] _Asolando_,