It is too soon to assign their permanent places to Tennyson and Browning; but there is little doubt of their survival among the singers whom the world will not forget. Both were fortunately born and well educated, though in different ways; both were happily situated in life; both had ample time in which to give full and rounded expression to their genius. Fame did not come early to either; but it discovered Tennyson in middle life, and for three or four decades it invested him with immense authority. Both were thinkers and students as well as singers, and both had ample intellectual resources. Tennyson was the finer artist; he was, indeed, one of the most perfect artists in the history of poetry. He had command of both harmony and melody; in other words, he could build a poem on strong constructive lines, and he could make it exquisitely musical. He mastered the resources of words; he knew how to use consonants and vowels so as to make his lines sing in the ear; he understood what can be done with assonance (resemblance in sound), repetition, alliteration. He was an expert workman; but never a mechanic alone. The stream of thought was not locked in poetic forms: it flowed freely through them. His art is so perfect that it conceals itself. He was not only a poet of exquisite skill, but he was a vigorous and independent thinker. The future historian of the intellectual and spiritual history of the nineteenth century will find “In Memoriam” what is called “an original authority” of far greater value than the formal records of the time. Some of the early short poems which captivated young readers in the ’30’s and ’40’s of the last century seem somewhat thin and artificial today; but the great mass of Tennyson’s poetry has substance as well as quality, and such poems as “Ulysses,” “Sir Galahad,” the “Two Voices,” have a noble reach of thought as well as a compelling music; while the magic which lives in “Break, Break, Break,” the songs from “The Princess,” “Crossing the Bar,” does not lose its spell. In power of thought, in deep religious feeling unbound by dogmatism, in faith in ordered liberty, in love of home, and in passion for beauty, Tennyson is the central figure of the Victorian Age. [Illustration: ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON From a mezzotint by T. A. Barlow, after the painting by Sir John E. Millais, made in 1881.] [Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING From a portrait painted at Rome in 1859 by Field Talfourd.] [Illustration: BROWNING’S HOME, 1887-9 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, London, England.]