Who was then the gentleman?
—on the pianola. Observe, pray, that I am not comparing the poetic gift, in which (as in other gifts of the gods) Tennyson very greatly outweighted Hood. I am merely setting some poets against others and contrasting the degrees in which they exhibit social or political sensitiveness. We should all allow, probably, that Robert Browning was a greater poet and a stronger thinker than his wife: but probably deny to him the acute indignation against human misery, social wrong, political injustice, evinced by the authoress of The Cry of the Children or Casa Guidi Windows. Of the two friends, Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, we should as probably admit Arnold to be the better poet as Clough to be the less occupied with his own soul, the more in vain attempt to save other men. So again among the Pre-Raphaelites Swinburne raves magnificently for the blood of tyrants: but when it came to lifting the oppressed, to throwing himself into the job, what a puff-ball was he beside William Morris who had announced himself as no more than “the idle singer of an empty day”!
One fishes in the night of deep sea pools:
For him the nets hang long and low,
Cork buoyed and strong: the silver gleaming schools
Come with the ebb and flow
Of universal tides, and all the channels glow.
Or holding with his hand the weighted line
He sounds the languors of the neaps,
Or feels what current of the springing brine