In nothing did the Victorian genius justify itself more fully than in its love poetry. Love, a theme which, apart from the Augustan silence which was broken only by such stray productions as James Hammond’s _Love Elegies_, has been constant in English lyric poetry, had never before been sung at one time with so many individual accents. In the poetry of speculative thought and religion the Victorian disintegration of mind may have led to a certain fluttered insecurity, a lack of the superb moral poise which distinguishes the Greek and the Miltonic epochs for example, when, no matter how individual the poet, the rules as to what was and what was not the proper material of poetry had some authority. It was not insignificant that whereas Browning, we feel, could pick up the subject for a long philosophic poem in a morning’s walk, Milton took twenty years to deliberate his choice. But in love poetry the advantage, by the same conditions, was with the Victorians. The law about the matter would seem to have a strange streak of paradox in its nature. To take speculative religion and love as contrasting themes by way of illustration, it would appear that since speculative religion is a thing about which at no time can there be any sort of standard or finality in the human mind, it is on the whole better for the purposes of art that some such standard arbitrarily fixed should be commonly accepted. On the other hand, since love is a thing about which in its actual nature there is little or no change from age to age as between one man and another, it profits art when individual interpretations of love are as wide as possible in their variety. The Greek drama, the high noon of Italian painting, the seventeenth-century devotional school of English lyric, all these gained enormously in impressiveness because in the creation of each of them there was present to every artist a more or less fixed central authority which he recognised as being greater than any he could set up by his own unaided meditation. But in love the individual’s authority is as great as any common authority can be, since love itself, as apart from thought about love, is the same in its essential nature, whatever measure of that nature may be given, to one man as to another, and so there is gain when that thought about love, as distinguished from love itself, is allowed the utmost freedom; and in this freedom the Victorian age in poetry is more personal than any that had preceded it. If we consider love poetry as a whole we shall find but an extremely small part of it is concerned with the fundamental ecstasy of love itself, with the adoration of the lover for the beloved in terms of ordinary experience and not modified by special circumstance as it was, for example, with Dante, and when it is so concerned it necessarily changes hardly at all except in verbal idiom from age to age. Love poetry, for the most part, is concerned not with love itself but with