Before returning to Browning, we may consider the influence that Tennyson further had--Tennyson, that is again to say, as representing the age’s normal modification of tradition--upon the diction of the more celebrated poets of the Victorian era. Matthew Arnold published his first book--_The Strayed Reveller and other Poems_ (apart from prize poems at Rugby and Oxford) in 1849, when he was twenty-seven years of age, and his second, _Empedocles on Etna_, three years later. So little attention was paid to books that contained some of the loveliest poetry of a century, that their author successively withdrew each of them from publication when a few copies had gone out, and they have become bibliographical treasures. With the two volumes of _Poems_, 1853 and 1855, however, he took his place among the acknowledged poets of the time, and although he has never been everybody’s poet, he has never since then been without admirers who would hardly admit any of his contemporaries as his better. The nature of his poetry will be referred to in the proper place, but its diction is of great importance in a study of the age’s versification. Professor Saintsbury[13] (who is just a little inclined to stand for the illiberal estimate of Arnold as a poet) says “he is most consistent in employing, or at least endeavouring to employ, a severer kind of diction and versification, drawing itself back from the florid and flowing Tennysonian scheme towards the stiffer movement and graver tones of Wordsworth, Gray, and (in his later years) Milton.” This is very perspicuous, but the very fact that there was in Arnold’s style something of a conscious drawing back from Tennyson’s manner implies that the influence of the older poet was by no means without its effect, and we shall find plainly that this was so. The fact is that Tennyson, “florid and flowing” as he may have been at times, was far from unconscious in much of his finest work of those models to whom Arnold is said to have turned by way of escape as it were. Neither Milton nor Gray nor Wordsworth could have written more gravely-toned than this, the Tennyson of _Ulysses_-- It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now the strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.... and, on the other hand, it is impossible to miss Tennyson’s modification of those models in much of Arnold’s representative poetry, or at least not to be aware that Arnold’s own instinct is moving in the same direction.