only the average thoughtful men, but the very best and finest minds
of his generation who wished to link the past and the present
together, and not to break with the old sanctities.

Tennyson's art suffered from the consciousness 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