... and in his ears The murmur of a thousand years: Before him he sees Life unroll, A placid and continuous whole; That general Life, which does not cease, Whose secret is not joy, but peace; That Life, whose dumb wish is not miss’d If birth proceeds, if things subsist: The Life of plants, and stones, and rain: The Life he craves; if not in vain Fate gave, what chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul. The instinct that led Arnold to such expression as this was akin to an austerity, sometimes stupidly confused with coldness, that is among the rarest and most secluded of poetry’s enchantments, the austerity of which the poet himself wrote-- Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay, Radiant, adorn’d outside; a hidden ground Of thought and of austerity within. If Arnold stood in his age for a chastening of the “florid and flowing” Tennysonian manner, though less unequivocally so, perhaps, than Professor Saintsbury would seem to suggest, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Swinburne, in their respective ways, carried that manner to its extreme emphasis. This, I need hardly say, does not mean that the style of any of these men was exclusively derived from Tennyson, but rather that the characteristic evolved by Tennyson from poetic tradition that warrants Professor Saintsbury’s “florid and flowing,” was developed by these younger poets into a poetic diction that was drawn partly from Tennyson’s own sources and partly from Tennyson himself. Just as the influence of Milton, Gray and Wordsworth upon Arnold was modified by the intervening practice of Tennyson, so was the influence of Chaucer, Spenser, Shelley, Byron and Keats in some measure affected by Tennyson before they reached Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne.