ousness of his enormous
responsibility, and where he failed was from his dread of unpopularity,
or his fear of alienating the ordinary man. Browning was interested in
ethical problems; his robust and fortunate temperament allowed him to
bridge over with a sort of buoyant healthiness the gaps of his
philosophy. But Tennyson's ethical failure lay in his desire to improve
the occasion, and to rule out all impulses that had not a social and
civic value. In the later "Idylls" he did his best to represent the
prig trailing clouds of glory, and to discourage lawlessness in every
form; but he was more familiar with the darker and grosser sides of
life than he allowed to appear in his verse, which suffers from an
almost prudish delicacy, which is more akin to respectability than to
moral courage.

But all this was the shadow of a very sensitive and melancholy
temperament. Comparatively little is known of the first forty years of
his life; it is after that time that the elaborate legend begins. Till
the time of his marriage, he must have been a constant anxiety to his
friends; his gloom, his inertia, his drifting mooning ways, his
hypochondria, his incapacity for any settled plan of life, all seemed
to portend an ultimate failure. But this troubled inertness was the
soil of his inspiration; his conceptions took slow and stately shape.
He never suffered from the haste, which as Dante says "mars all decency
of act." After that time he enjoyed a great domestic happiness, and
practised considerable sociability. His terrifying demeanour, his
amazing personal dignity and majesty, the certainty that he would say
whatever came into his head, whether it was profound and solemn, or
testy and discourteous, gave him a personal ascendancy that never
disappointed a pilgrim.

But he lived all his life in a perpetual melancholy, feeling the
smallest slights acutely, hating at once obscurity and publicity, aware
of his renown, yet shrinking from the evidences of it. He could be
distracted by company, soothed by wine and tobacco; but left to itself,
his mind fell helplessly down the dark slope into a sadness and a
dreariness which deprived life of its savour. It was not that his dread
was a definite one; he was strong and tough physically, and he regarded
death with a solemn curiosity; but he had a sense of the profitlessness
of vacant hours, unthrilled by beauty and delight, and had also a
morbid pride, of the nature of vanity, which caused him