to "Dark Rosaleen," Mangan's best known lyric and itself a glorious allegorical expression of fervid patriotism. In any anthology of Irish verse Mangan sits among the princes. In "Dark Rosaleen" and elsewhere he appears to have anticipated the music of repetition afterwards so effectively developed by Poe. William Barnes, memorable for his poems in the Dorset dialect, was a remarkably versatile man alike in the range of his study and literary work and in the various vocations of schoolmaster, engraver, musician, and philologist. Barnes is no such singer as we find even among some of the lesser followers of Burns, but the lyrical spirit is in him, and he has distilled genuine poetry out of the familiar happenings of rural life and raised his provincial dialect of Dorsetshire to a place in literature. The revival of the literary drama that came between the publication of Shelley's Cenci, in 1819, and the accession of Victoria cannot be discussed here. This revival was due, in the main, to the renewed study and reading of Elizabethan drama, and the occasional lyrics that it inspired echo those of the old age. There are no lyrics in Wells's Joseph and his Brethren with which this revival began; and the lyrical poetry of Thomas Wade, especially his sonnets, justly described as "thoughtful, tender, original, and strong," does not occur in his several dramas.1 The varied and interesting poetry, too, of Richard Henry Horne, dramatic, epic, narrative, and didactic, yields 1 Wade's Fifty Sonnets are reprinted in Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, 1895, London. very few poems that are strictly lyrical. The lyrist of the group is that strange reincarnation of the genius that animated Webster or Tourneur, contorted with a strand of modern introspection, Thomas Lovell Beddoes; and his is an isolated and distinctive position among our modern poets. Beddoes is practically a man of a single work, Death's Jest Book, a tragedy of rare poetic and literary value, published in 1850, the year after the poet's death by his own hand. It belongs in point of plan and composition to his early manhood. Beddoes, like Wells, held complaisant mediocrity in a haughty disdain. To quote his own words: "It is good to be tolerable, or intolerable, in any other line; but Apollo defend us from brewing all our lives at the quintessential pot of the smallest ale Parnassian." The lyrics of Beddoes are unequal in execution, however the animating force of poetry may sustain them. At his best, for a weird originality of thought and a competence, if not always a music of expression, they will hold their own with the best. John Webster would have compassed the effect of this stanza more vigorously, but hardly would even he have bettered it: Young soul, put off your flesh, and come With me into the silent tomb, Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet; And the warm leaden sheet. Dear and dear is their poisoned note, 1 Quoted by R. Garnett in his article on Beddoes, Miles, Poets of the Century, Keats to Lytton, n. d., p. 524. The little snakes' of silver throat, As to the other names of dramatic note in these preVictorian days, the songs of Sir Henry Taylor, whether in Philip van Artevelde or elsewhere, are really pitiful for a Southeyan of such estimable repute; and those of Bulwer, Lord Lytton, which are equally remote from the influences of our earlier poets, belong to the easy, trivial school of Moore and Procter, touched with the prevalent Byronism. In this chapter we have considered the leaders of the romantic revival and enumerated some of their lesser brethren who wrote lyrically. We have treated many who, although they began to write earlier, wrote on into the reign of Queen Victoria. We must defer to the next chapter such as began to write only in her reign or those whose actual poetical activity received the impetus that placed it in its true orbit subsequent to the queen's accession. The thirties wrought havoc among the poets; Scott and Crabbe died in 1832, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834, Hogg a year later. Among the names mentioned above, Southey, Hood, and Darley lived on into the forties, the two latter active in literature to the last. Moore closed his long career with his Poetical Works in ten volumes, 1840-41, and lived on for nearly a dozen years; Hunt wrote to the last, publishing Stories in Verse as late as 1855, four years before his death. Procter's work like that of Peacock, Elliott, Wells, and several others, belonged, by Victoria's time, to the past. Wells and Peacock survived into the seventies; Taylor, Barnes, and Horne, into the eighties. But among the veterans of early nineteenth-century poetry, Wordsworth and Landor alone continued productive far into the reign. Wordsworth wrote and published poetry in six decades; Landor in eight, bridging the age of Cowper and that of Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, whither we are now to follow him. CHAPTER VII THE VICTORIAN LYRISTS ITH the great Victorian laureate dead, even now only a score of years, and his throne unfilled, however occupied - as who could fill that spacious chair of regal poetic state? - it seems all but incredible that verse of Alfred Tennyson's should have seen print in the year 1826. It was in that year that Poems by Two Brothers (there were really three) was published with little promise, it must be confessed, of the glory that was to come. Nor were Tennyson's first unaided poetical efforts, the volumes of 1830 and 1832, however promising to discerning minds, wholly undeserving of the disapproval that the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's meted out to them. But Tennyson was not born to failure; and, unlike most men of sensitive poetic endowment, an iron will nerved him to snatch success from defeat. For ten years he was silent, undiverted by temptation to other occupations, living simply and with economy as he untiringly perfected his art; and with the Poems of 1842, the added ones and those revised, it was known-if still only to the few-that another great English poet had arisen to 'maintain the high traditions of the past. The Tennysons were gentle folk, and all that tradition, restraint, cultivated surroundings, |