, and some sang as they felt and were,
but with this difference added that you would no longer identify the
age with the utterance. There were many survivals: most of Coleridge,
all of Rogers, much of Byron, some of Wordsworth (_Laodamia_) is
eighteenth century; and then, for the first time, you could archaicize
or walk in Wardour Street--Macpherson had taught us that, and Bishop
Percy. But all of Shelley and Keats, the best of Coleridge and
Wordsworth belong to no age.

The pale stars are gone!
For the sun, their swift shepherd,
To their folds them compelling,
In the depths of the dawn,
Hastes in meteor-eclipsing array and they flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard.
But where are ye?

That is like nothing on earth: music and diction are stark new. And
that was the way of it for a forty years of freedom.

Then came a reaction. With Queen Victoria we all went to church again
in our Sunday clothes. You cannot date Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth
by the fashions; but you can date Tennyson assuredly. He belongs
to the top-hat and the crinoline; to _Friends in Council_ and "nice
feelings." True, there was nothing dressy about Tennyson himself. I
doubt if he ever wore a top-hat. But is not _The Gardener's Daughter_
in ringlets? Did not Aunt Elizabeth and Sister Lilia wear crinolines?
And as for _Maud_--

Look, a horse at the door,
And little King Charley snarling:
Go back, my lord, across the moor,
You are not her darling.

That settles it. "Little King Charley's" name would have been Gyp.
I yield to no man in my admiration of _In Memoriam_; but when one
compares it with _Adonais_ it is impossible not to allocate the one
and salute the other as for all time and place:

When in the down I sink my head
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my breath;
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, knows not Death,
Nor can I dream of thee as dead.

And then:

He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone.

No: _In Memoriam_ is a beautiful poem, and technically a much better
one than _Adonais_. But the spirit is different; narrower, more
circumscribed; in a word, it dates, like the top-hat and the
crinoline.

In our day, clothes have lost touch with mankind, they cover the body
but do not express the soul. With the vogue of the short coat, shor