It is perhaps hardly necessary to explain that in the words "successors of Tennyson" I make no reference to an actual or a prospective Poet Laureate. The position primarily held by Tennyson in his lifetime, and the only position in which posterity will regard him, is the position of the poet. That he was the laureate also is no doubt a matter of some biographical interest, but it is of little further significance. It will be doing no injustice to the large quantity of agreeable verse-writing which has been executed by Mr. Alfred Austin if we take it for granted that his appointment carries the laureateship back to what it was before Wordsworth and Tennyson lent it the lustre of their names. The laureate is now, as in the days of Southey, a literary officer in the Queen's service, chosen, as other officers are wont to be chosen, by the political powers that be. Our present interest is rather in those who come after Tennyson as pre-eminent among the free and single-hearted servants of the Muses. Again, by his "successors" I mean simply those who come after--those masters of younger birth who seem most nearly to take his place now that he is gone--not any avowed disciples, still less servile imitators of his thought or style. Following upon Homer there was the school of the Homeridae, or "sons of Homer." A cluster of poets at the beginning of the seventeenth century were styled "the sons of Ben Jonson." There are no doubt "sons of Tennyson" at this present date. With these we have now no concern. They are but satellites, while that for which we are scanning the poetical horizon is a rising star of a magnitude in some degree comparable with the stars which have set with the deaths of Matthew Arnold, Browning and Tennyson. There is, I believe, more than one such star already well advanced into the firmament. I am one of those who believe that this is an age unusually rich in genuine poetry. There are to-day singing in the English tongue enough of so-called minor poets to have made the poetical fortune of any epoch between the Elizabethan period and our own. This century has seen re-enthroned the Miltonic doctrine that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and passionate"; it has learned from Wordsworth of the divinity in Nature, from Shelley of the passion in it, from Tennyson how to express its moods; it has learned from Byron how to be frank about humanity, from Wordsworth how to sympathize with it, from Browning how to understand it; it has been taught by Shelley how to write with melody, by Keats how to write with richness, by Wordsworth with simplicity, by Tennyson with grace and luminousness, by Arnold with chasteness. It has availed itself of these great examples to such good purpose that the average of reputable verse written to-day is more instinct with feeling, more vitalised with thought, more satisfying in expression, than much which is studied and belauded and quoted because it was written a century or two ago.