The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1900-06-06

periments made by each, we may
safely say that the genius of Brown
ing was primarily and permanently
dramatic, for even his lyrics and mar
ratives are suffused by dramatic in
stincts. while the work Of Tennyson
just as clearly is lyrical IN its inmost
impulse.
While the great masters wrote, other
poets rose and fell. Between 1850 and
1860 appeared those thoughtful poets OF
the inner life Matthew Arnold and Ar
thur Hugh Clough. They represent the
blood of a period deeply affected by the
tractarian movement and by the wide
spread religious unrest that was affect
ing the nation. Dissatisfied with the
vague, if high spiritual pantheism of
Wordsworth and Shelley, powerfully
drawn toward Christianity, yet unable
either to accept or to reject ii, these
poets sung in a piercing eleciac strain
the sorrows, the consultations, the resO-
lutiOns of the inner life.
1.-The sea Of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round
Lay like the folds of bright girdle
curled;
But now / only hear
| It's melancholy. long, Withdrawing roar,
Retreating, TO the breath
OF the night wind down the vast edges
And naked shingles of the world
/ So wrote Arnold, with mOurnful elo-
/ quence and polished art, in his Dover
! Peach" and ClOugh echoed the plant,
in lines pulsing with perhaps more en-
/ tireIy sincere passion if less perfectly
and felicitcusly phrased:
Eat drink and die. for we are souls be-
OF all 'f the &c creatures under heavens high
We are most hopeless who had once most
And most aSB' beliehess who had once be-
lieved."
They arose, those poets of the desires
and regrets of the spirit; but their day
was not long. though they left verse
/ that for certain thoughtful, wistful peo-
pie will never lose its power. Clough
| died in 1861: a little later and Arnold
had turned away from poetry, singing
as his swan song his beautiful 'Thyr-
sis" an eleey on his friend, and had
devoted himself to his Illuminating
/ work as a critic in prose. Tennyson
and Browning had been before the pub
lie for fifteen years when these poets
began to write; their poetic expressions
continued for nearly thirty years long
er.
About the time when Arnold and
! Clough fell on silence there made itself
heard in our poetic literature q new
| cry-the cry for beauty. Evolutionary
science, with its passion for investiga-
ton: the democracy, with its enthusi-
asm for averages, were in full swing;
! but there arose a protest not to be
| subdued, a protest that asserted as the
rightful attitude wonder rather than
Investigation, and devoted itself to the
quest of the rare. the strange, the love-
". rather than to the analysis of the
commonplace. The pose writings of
Ruskin, widely read since the early 40's,
had done much TO stimulate this mood;
much. too, had been done by the pre-
Raphaelite movement in painting; more
still, perhaps, was due to the strong,
inevitable reaction from the ugliness
and vulgarity which since the introduce
ton of machine manufacture had been
submerging England. Rossetti, Morris,
Swinburne were the three poets who
dedicated themselves to this movement
for the revival of beauty-knights OF
the romantic temper we well might call
them Two of them, ROssetti and Nor
ris, expressed their feelings through
visible art as well as through verse
Rossetti through strange, troubling
pictures; Morris through varied de-
lightful experiments in the decorative
arts. The lovely poems of all three,
charged as they were with color and
passion, formed a welcome 1nterlude ln-
deed in our age Of prose. Yet they were
exotics rather than natural gfowths.
Such poems as Rossetti's Rose Mary,
Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon'' or
Morris Earthly Paradise" could ex-
press only a few of the manifold crav-
ings of modern life, and these not prob
ably the most significant. This school,
too soon waned. BY 1885 Rossetti
wrote 40 more: Morris was turned So
cialist, and no longer the idle dreamer
of an empty day" but a vigorous. prac-
tical reformer, was trying to recreate
this actual world in an image of beau