Armed with this gracious permission on the part of a professor of poetry, we may venture to reason a little upon the foregoing quotations from Tennyson and Browning to the effect that the person of really good taste might like each of them in its place. While Tennyson's mystical quatrain is beautiful and quite appropriate in such a poem as "In Memoriam," it would not be in the least appropriate from the lips of a little silk-winding girl as she wanders through the streets of Asolo on a sunny morning singing her little songs. She is certainly a more lifelike child speaking Browningese, as she has often been criticised for doing, than she would be if upon this occasion she spoke in a Tennysonian manner. That her song has touched the hearts of the twentieth century, if it was not altogether appreciated in the nineteenth, is proved by the fact that it is one of the most popular songs of the day as set by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, and that the line is heard upon the lips of people to-day who do not even know whose it is, and herein lies the ultimate test of greatness. VI CLASSIC SURVIVALS Before passing in review Browning's treatment of classical subjects as compared with the other great poets of the nineteenth century, it will be interesting to take a glimpse at his choice of subject-matter in general. To compare Browning's choice of subject-matter with that of other English poets is to strike at the very root of his position in the chain of literary development. Subject-matter is by no means simple in its nature, but as a musical sound is composed of vibrations within vibrations, so it is made up of the complex relations of body and spirit--the mere external facts of the story are blended with such philosophical undercurrent, or dramatic _motif_, or unfolding of the hidden springs of action as the poet is able to insinuate into it. However far back one penetrates in the history of poetry, poets will be found depending largely upon previous sources, rather than upon their own creative genius, for the body of their subject-matter, until the question presents itself with considerable force as to who could have been the mysterious first poet who supplied plots to the rest of mankind. Conjecture is obliged to play a part here, as it does wherever human origins are in question. Doubtless, this first poet was no separate individual, but simply the elements man and nature, through whose action and reaction upon each other grew up story-forms, evidently compounded of human customs, and observed natural phenomena such as those we find in the great Hindu, Greek, and Teutonic classics, and which thus crystallized became great well-springs of inspiration for future generations of poets.