r Browning was not read of old; but it is no
wonder, when the new History was made, when he was once found out, that
he passed from a few to a multitude of readers.

6. Another contrast appears at the very beginning of their career.
Tennyson, in his two earliest books in 1830 and 1833, though clearly
original in some poems, had clinging round his singing robes some of the
rags of the past. He wrote partly in the weak and sentimental strain of
the poets between 1822 and 1832. Browning, on the contrary, sprang at
once into an original poetic life of his own. _Pauline_ was unfinished,
irregular in form, harsh, abrupt, and overloaded, but it was also
entirely fresh and distinct. The influence of Shelley echoes in it, but
much more in admiration than in imitation of him. The matter, the spirit
of the poem were his own, and the verse-movement was his own. Had
Browning been an imitator, the first thing he would have imitated would
have been the sweet and rippling movement of Shelley's melodies. But the
form of his verse, such as it was, arose directly out of his own nature
and was as original as his matter. Tennyson grew into originality,
Browning leaped into it; born, not of other poets, but of his own will.
He begat himself. It had been better for his art, so far as technical
excellence is concerned, had he studied and imitated at first the
previous masters. But he did not; and his dominant individuality, whole
in itself and creating its own powers, separates him at the very
beginning from Tennyson.

7. Tennyson became fully original, but he always admitted, and sometimes
encouraged in himself, a certain vein of conventionality. He kept the
opinions of the past in the matter of caste. He clung to certain
political and social maxims, and could not see beyond them. He sometimes
expressed them as if they were freshly discovered truths or direct
emanations from the Deity of England. He belonged to a certain type of
English society, and he rarely got out of it in his poetry. He inhabited
a certain Park of morals, and he had no sympathy with any self-ethical
life beyond its palings. What had been, what was proper and recognised,
somewhat enslaved in Tennyson that distinctiveness and freedom of
personality which is of so much importance in poetry, and which, had it
had more liberty in Tennyson, would have made him a still greater poet
than he was.

Browning, on the other hand--much more a person in society than
Tennyson, much mo