A further result was that a good deal of Victorian work is of a lowered significance when set beside work of corresponding eminence in other ages. The moments of artistic surrender such as we find playing havoc with Tennyson’s poetry in such a passage as that given by _Guinevere_ were not uncommon in the work of the age, though they often came in another and less disastrous aspect. The arbitrariness that so often governed--or left ungoverned--the Victorian choice of subject, could not but sometimes bring about a relation of something less than the highest imaginative urgency between the poet and the occasion of his verse. In the general run of poetic practice this did not necessarily mean an entire failure of the spirit nor a total absence of enchantment, but it did more often than not make the thing created seem to be less inevitably an addition to the riches of English poetry. A great deal of the work of so admirable a poet as Mrs. Browning, for example, is heavily marked by this condition. Setting aside her obvious but unimportant technical deficiencies, we find in reading one long piece of hers after another that it “hath all the good gifts of nature” except indisputable evidence of its original necessity. A poem such as _An Island_ sparkles with tender and expressive imagery-- For all this island’s creature-full (Kept happy not by halves), Mild cows that at the vine-wreaths pull, Then low back at their calves With tender lowings, to approve The warm mouths milking them for love. Free gamesome horses, antelopes, And harmless leaping leopards, And buffaloes upon the slopes, And sheep unruled by shepherds; Hares, lizards, hedgehogs, badgers, mice, Snakes, squirrels, frogs, and butterflies. And birds that live there in a crowd, Horned owls, rapt nightingales, Larks bold with heaven, and peacocks proud, Self-sphered in those grand tails; All creatures glad and safe, I deem. No guns nor springes in my dream!