We now, however, reach the Victorian Age of letters in England, and it is difficult to select. Whether Tennyson’s smooth and careful verse and Robert Browning’s rugged and intellectual poems ought to be included here may be disputed, but much of the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1857-1909), especially his _Poems and Ballads_ and _Songs Before Sunrise_, has a glow of passion and a beauty of language that puts it in the highest category. The _Essays_ of Lord Macaulay (1800-59), the _Sartor Resartus_ (a unique philosophical diatribe), and _The History of the French Revolution_ of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the noble prose of the _Seven Lamps_, _Stones of Venice_ and _Modern Painters_ of John Ruskin (1819-1900), the _Marius the Epicurean_ of Walter Pater (1839-94), some of the novels of George Eliot (or Mary Ann Cross, 1819-1850), of George Meredith (1828-1909), the _Way of All Flesh_ and _Erewhon_ of Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Huxley’s _Essays_ (on science and religion), and Froude’s _History of England_, and Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ (1859), may be selected out of the mass of fine or notable works. I again refrain from noticing living writers, but one wonders if any living British author will be read fifty years from now. Possibly, in fact, half or two-thirds of the works I have noticed in this section will gradually pass out of that select circle which contains the world’s classics. Already some whom contemporaries considered as likely to live--Trollope, Southey, Lamb, Hazlitt, Cobbett, the Bronté sisters, etc.--are mere names in the history of English literature. §4. AMERICAN CLASSICS This difficulty of selection presses particularly upon one when we turn to American literature. Few great American writers are old enough to have endured and passed the test of time, and American literature as a whole appears under peculiar circumstances. The reader will have noticed throughout this sketch how great poetry, especially, belongs to definite periods. We talk of the Golden Age of Greek and Latin letters, the art of the Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age, the Storm and Stress Period in Germany, and so on. These artistic periods mark a point where a new civilization has reached its full development yet has not yet become fully intellectualized, or a time when a revolution of some kind or other has entered its blood. All this was over when the United States was born. Its vast population in the nineteenth century was made up from European nations which had long since passed through their feverish periods.