intellectual and minute investigation, turned to realise, not the long
inward life of a soul with all its motives laid bare, but sudden moments
of human passion, swift and unoutlined impressions on the senses, the
moody aspects of things, flared-out concentrations of critical hours of
thought and feeling which years perhaps of action and emotion had
brought to the point of eruption. Impressionism was born in painting,
poetry, sculpture and music.

It was curious that, when we sought for a master who had done this in
the art of poetry, we found that Browning--who had in long poems done
the very opposite of impressionism--had also, in a number of short
poems, anticipated impressionist art by nearly forty years. _Porphyria's
Lover_, many a scene in _Sordello_, _My Last Duchess_, _The Laboratory_,
_Home Thoughts from Abroad_, are only a few out of many. It is pleasant
to think of the ultimate appearance of Waring, flashed out for a moment
on the sea, only to disappear. In method, swiftness and colour, but done
in verse, it is an impressionist picture, as vivid in transient scenery
as in colour. He did the same sort of work in poems of nature, of human
life, of moments of passion, of states of the soul. That is another
reason why he was not read at first, and why he is read now. He was
impressionist long before Impressionism arrived. When it arrived he was
found out. And he stood alone, for Tennyson is never impressionist, and
never could have been. Neither was Swinburne nor Arnold, Morris nor
Rossetti.

3. Again, in the leisured upper ranges of thought and emotion, and in
the extraordinary complexity of human life which arose, first, out of
the more intimate admixture of all classes in our society; and secondly,
out of the wider and more varied world-life which increased means of
travel and knowledge afforded to men, Tennyson's smooth, melodious,