"Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!"[15]
His verse often swells and falls with a wavelike rhythm as in Saul or in these lines in Abt Vogler:—
"There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arc; in the heaven, a perfect round."
While, therefore, Browning's poetry is sometimes harsh, faulty, and obscure, at times his melodies can be rhythmically simple and beautiful. He is one of the subtlest analysts of the human mind, the most original and impassioned poet of his age, and one of the most hopeful, inspiring, and uplifting teachers of modern times.
ALFRED TENNYSON, 1809-1892
[Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON. From a photograph by Mayall.]
Life.—Alfred Tennyson, one of the twelve children of the rector of
Somersby, Lincolnshire, was born in that hamlet in 1809, a year
memorable, both in England and America for the birth of such men as
Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar
Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln.
Visitors to the Somersby rectory, in which Tennyson was born, note that it fits the description of the home in his fine lyric, The Palace of Art:—
"…an English home,—gray twilight pour'd
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep—all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient peace."
His mother, one of the beauties of Lincolnshire, had twenty-five offers of marriage. Of her Tennyson said in The Princess:—