The number of our
imaginative writers--poets and romancers, but especially the
latter--has been out of all proportion great. We give the place of
honour, as is their due, to the singers rather than to the
story-tellers, the more readily since the popular taste, it cannot be
denied, chooses its favourites in inverse order as a rule.
[Illustration: Robert Browning. _From a Photograph by Elliott &
Fry_.]
When Her Majesty ascended the throne, one brilliant poetical
constellation was setting slowly, star by star. Keats and Shelley and
Byron, none of them much older than the century, had perished in
their early prime between 1820 and 1824; Scott had sunk under the
storms of fortune in 1832; the fitful glimmer of Coleridge's genius
vanished in 1834, and a year later "the gentle Elia" too was gone.
Southey, who still held the laureate-ship in 1837, had faded out of
life in 1843, and was succeeded in his once-despised office by
William Wordsworth, who, with Rogers and Leigh Hunt and Moore, lived
far into the new reign, uniting the Georgian and the Victorian school
of writers. Thomas Hood, the poet of the poor and oppressed, whose
too short life ended in 1845, gives in his serious verse such
thrilling expression to the impassioned, indignant philanthropy,
which has actuated many workers and writers of our own period, that
it is not easy to reckon him with the older group.
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