So much for the Tennysonian influence upon Victorian technique, and the questions arising from the work of poets who were subject to, or part of, that influence. The manner which we have examined as being characteristically Browning’s made a far less marked impression upon the work of his age. It can hardly be said of any of the greater poets of the time that he wrote differently because of Browning’s example. There are notes in some of Morris’s early work in which we can detect a moment’s consciousness of the Browning idiom—in Sir Peter Harper’s End for instance—but it passed never to return, and is nowhere else to be found in the principal poets of the time, with one exception to be mentioned. Browning’s influence upon later poetry is another matter, but not one for discussion here, where it must be sufficient to repeat that in the new vigour that came into English poetry after the perfumed dusk of the eighteen-nineties[15] Browning is likely to be found by critical historians to have had a considerable hand. Of the less celebrated Victorian poets, who were yet in some measure an adornment of their age, three found in Browning’s technique a more constant inspiration to their own. These were Richard Hengist Horne, Alfred Domett and T. E. Brown. Horne was a strange figure in Victorian poetry who gets an obscure corner in the anthologies, and is otherwise forgotten save as a friend of the Brownings. But he was a poet of great ambitions, and of a good deal more achievement than we remember. His epic poem Orion, which attained much fame in its time, and some permanent notoriety as the Farthing Epic, so called because Horne, angered by public neglect when it first appeared, contemptuously had it sold at a farthing, is a very readable work for any one who cares to try it and is not afraid of poetry in long measure. Also he wrote many admirable short pieces, and his work as a whole only needed more of the discipline that would have kept him from sprawling in poetry to have given him a much wider reputation than he now enjoys. He was an older man than Browning, having been born in 1803, but he lived a long working life of eighty years, and so far as he made his poetic mark in either direction it was rather in Browning’s than in Tennyson’s. The Plough, justly the best known of his lyrics, has a kind of ungarlanded earthiness and an impetus in its conclusion that remind us rather of Browning’s robust method than of the more opulent tendencies of the age.
Above yon sombre swell of land
Thou seest the dawn’s grave orange hue,
With one pale streak like yellow sand,
And over that a vein of blue.
The air is cold above the woods;
All silent is the earth and sky,
Except with his own lonely moods
The blackbird holds a colloquy.
Over the broad hill creeps a beam,