The death of Tennyson, following so closely on those of Browning and Matthew Arnold, produced a violent and disturbing crisis in our poetical history. At the first moment, in the agitation caused by the disappearance of these extremely dignified figures, and particularly by the extinction of Tennyson, the critics rashly asserted that poetry had ceased to develop; that it would henceforward be the pastime of children; and that it could no longer form a vital branch of our literature. Almost immediately it was perceived that whatever might happen, a neglect of verse was not imminent. We had long served under a gerantocracy, a tyranny by very old men. These venerable figures once removed, attention became fixed on men of the youngest generation. When all the ancient trees have fallen in the forest, the sturdiest saplings have room to expand. Of these some may be oaks and some may be alders, but all have a chance at last. We have seen no visible increase of public interest in the poets who already held high second or third rank (although the extreme respect with which the announcement of Christina Rossetti’s death was received points to an understratum of appreciation for these), but we have certainly seen a sudden access of reputation among writers between thirty-five and twenty-five years of age. The pendulum of taste is ever swinging, and from the opinion that no one under eighty was worth reading, we have come to regard no one over thirty as deserving our attention. It will be unfortunate, I think, if the poets allow themselves to be disturbed by the conditions of crisis through which we are now passing. I deprecate the use of phrases such as hail one or two young versemen as: “Swans emerging from the ruck of geese.” A swan may once have been an ugly duckling; he has never been a goose, and exaggerations of this kind tend to encourage what is by far the most dangerous tendency of the literature of to-day, its commercial greediness. Coleridge, in his old age, told a friend of mine, who was then young, that he had never been one shilling the better off for all the verse he had ever printed. Mr. Dykes Campbell will tell us that this was an error of memory, but practically speaking it was true. In our own century, surrounded by admirers, living long past maturity, here was one of the truest poets of England confessing that poetry had been not so much a failure to him as a bankruptcy. Browning, to the very end of his days, through the period of his splendid late celebrity, could never have lived, however modestly, on what his poetry put into his pocket. These are the instances which the poet should bear in mind, nor allow himself to be dazzled by the almost inexplicable and entirely exceptional success of the career of Tennyson.