fused to make his poetry the servant of the
transient, of the changing elements of the world. He avoided the
contemporary. For this high reserve we and the future of art will owe
him gratitude.

On the contrast between the theology we find in Tennyson and Browning,
and on the contrast between their ethical positions, it will be wiser
not to speak in this introduction. These two contrasts would lead me too
far afield, and they have little or nothing to do with poetry. Moreover,
Browning's theology and ethics, as they are called, have been discussed
at wearying length for the last ten years, and especially by persons who
use his poetry to illustrate from it their own systems of theology,
philosophy and ethics.

10. I will pass, therefore, to another contrast--the contrast between
them as Artists.

A great number of persons who write about the poets think, when they
have said the sort of things I have been saying, that they have said
either enough, or the most important things. The things are, indeed,
useful to say; they enable us to realise the poet and his character, and
the elements of which his poetry is made. They place him in a clear
relation to his time; they distinguish him from other poets, and, taken
all together, they throw light upon his work. But they are not half
enough, nor are they the most important. They leave out the essence of
the whole matter; they leave out the poetry. They illuminate the surface
of his poetry, but they do not penetrate into his interpretation, by
means of his special art, and under the influence of high emotion, of
the beautiful and sublime Matter of thought and feeling which arises out
of Nature and Human Nature, the two great subjects of song; which Matter
the poets represent in a form so noble and so lovely in itself that,
when it is received into a heart prepared for it, it kindles in the
receiver a love of beauty and sublimity similar to that which the poet
felt before he formed, and while he formed, his poem. Such a receiver,
reading the poem, makes the poem, with an individual difference, in
himself. And this is the main thing; the eternal, not the temporary
thing.

Almost all I have already discussed with regard to Tennyson and Browning
belongs to the temporary; and the varying judgments which their public
have formed of them, chiefly based on their appeal to the tendencies of
the time, do not at all predict what the final judgment on these men as
poets is likely to be.