of the individual poet, who set his verse to the song that was
within him, and chose such subjects as would best embody and articulate
that song.

But by the end of the first quarter of the present century,
the great poetical billow, which was not indeed caused by,
but received an impulse from, the great political billow,
the French Revolution (for they were cognate or co-radical movements),
had quite spent itself, and English poetry was at a comparatively
low ebb. The Poetical Revolution had done its work.
A poetical interregnum of a few years' duration followed,
in which there appeared to be a great reduction of the spiritual life
of which poetry is the outgrowth.

Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, in his article `On the Early Writings
of Robert Browning', in the `Century' for December, 1881,
has characterized this interregnum a little too contemptuously,
perhaps. There was, indeed, a great fall in the spiritual tide;
but it was not such a dead-low tide as Mr. Gosse would make it.

At length, in 1830, appeared a volume of poems by a young man,
then but twenty-one years of age, which distinctly marked
the setting in of a new order of things. It bore the following title:
`Poems, chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson, London:
Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830.' pp. 154.

The volume comprised fifty-three poems, among which were `The Poet'
and `The Poet's Mind'. These two poems were emphatically indicative
of the high ideal of poetry which had been attained,
and to the development of which the band of poets of