osition of that
subject, no age should be too late.

Certainly this age was not too late with him. The contents all
answered strictly enough to their title, except that _Empedocles on
Etna_ and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning's
request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and
that _Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night_, and the _Grande
Chartreuse_ had made magazine appearances. Again the moment was
most important. When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting with an apology
the "transient and embarrassed phantom" of _Merope_) an
appearance in 1855, the transition age of English nineteenth-century
poetry was in full force. No one's place was safe but Tennyson's; and
even his was denied by some, including Mr Arnold himself, who never
got his eyes quite clear of scales in that matter. Browning, though he
had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had them allowed; the
Spasmodics had not disappeared; the great prae-Raphaelite school was
but on the way. The critics knew not what to think; the vulgar thought
(to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper. Both classes, critic and
public, rent _Maud_ and neglected _Men and Women: The Defence
of Guenevere_ had not yet rung the matins--bell in the ears of the
new generation.

Now things were all altered. The mixture of popularity and perfection
in the _Idylls_ and the _Enoch Arden_ volume--the title poem
and _Aylmer's Field_ for some, _The Voyage_ and _Tithonus_ and _In the
Valley of Cauterets_ for others--had put Tennyson's place

"Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men."

The three-volume collection of Browning's _Poems_, and
_Dramatis Personae_ which followed to clench it, had nearly, if
not quite, done the same for him. _The Defence of Guenevere_ and
_The Life and Death of Jason, Atalanta, Chastelard_, and most of
all the _Poems and Ballads_, had launched an entirely new
poetical school with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the world.
The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not
yet quite) laughed out of existence. That Mr Arnold's own poems had
had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they
were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read. You
had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of
Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which
mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from
accident, knew them