It is true that there are themes that were new a thousand years ago and will be new a thousand years hence, but a poet to achieve distinct success must strike a note not only individual, but one closely attuned to the thought and feeling of his time. Milton we know rather as a voice of Puritan England than as a poetic genius. We call Wordsworth a great poet and are conscious as we do so, that he deserves the distinction rather because he interpreted to men a new phase of thought and feeling, than because he knew how to make his verse wholly pure poetry rather than bald prose. Even poets of such spiritual elevation as Shelley and Coleridge caught the feeling and the tone of their time, and the revolutionary spirit and the love of nature that was molding Wordsworth finds a distinct voice in them as well. Even Burns, isolated as he was, is not altogether an anomaly, and no one need be told that Byron was in an extreme degree the voice of the reactionary spirit of post-revolutionary Europe. William Morris, retelling old legends of Greek and Saxon, none the less informed his verse with the humanitarian and æsthetic spirit of modern life, and applied his sense of the beautiful to the problems of nineteenth century existence. Swinburne, too, is democratic and in his vision the world moves on to new glories even though the old be not wholly faded from the earth. Robert Browning is first and fundamentally a painter of character, a student of the more subtle moods that dominate the individual, and toward this the reader of English fiction would hardly fail to see that the development of literature has steadily been advancing for two centuries. Even Mrs. Browning through the somewhat morbid and mawkish sentimentality and the overstrained art of “Aurora Leigh,” in the vague and uncertain way of a woman whose contact with reality was necessarily slight, catches at the problems of nineteenth century feeling. Tennyson, as all men know, gave us poetry that was inwrought of the latest word of science, the last aspiration of religious hope, the newest sure conclusion in the field of social endeavor for the betterment of man.