the lover’s attitude towards and contemplation of his love, in fact, not with love so much as with thought about love. And this thought about love from age to age had in poetry been largely governed by a common attitude prevalent at the time. Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_, and a few individual lyrics by other men, are so well known to every reader of poetry that it is difficult to say how readily we could distinguish them without their familiarity, but beyond these it is safe to say of the great body of Elizabethan love lyric, with all its superb singing quality and varied command of imagery, that we could never with any certainty tell one poet from another by the nature of his attitude towards his subject. And so in a later age, although we may find one fashion contending with another, the respective sides are governed by their own rules and there is no reason why the poet who wrote “Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind” should not also have written “Ask me no more where Job bestows,” or, on the other hand, why the poet who wrote Shall I wasting in despair Die because a woman’s fair.... should not also have written Out upon it! I have lov’d Three whole days together.... With the return of love as a theme to English poetry in the Romantic Revival, there was for a time no very decided movement either towards a general character or away from it. Wordsworth dealt with the subjective love emotion but very rarely, it inspired but a few verses of Keats’s best work, Byron’s poetic rank would have been very little affected if, with the exception of two or three stanzas, he had not used the theme at all, and, apart from Shelley, Landor is the only other poet who contributed any considerable love poetry to an age which was mostly concerned in other directions. Shelley’s great and personal love poetry stands by itself in its time, as did Donne’s at an earlier period. But, generally speaking, it may be said that in each age before the Victorians when love poetry had been a common practice in English verse it had been marked always by reference to some general attitude, with the result that although it had never been deficient in lyric beauty it had been, apart from individual exceptions like Donne and Shelley, definitely limited in its psychological interest. With the Victorians, however, the most striking thing in this matter is that every poet of any consequence wrote love poetry and wrote a good deal of it, and it is never possible for a moment to confuse the love poetry of one with that of any other. The specific nature of each poet’s individual contribution could only be attempted in separate studies in detail of those poets and cannot be analysed in this brief study of general characteristics. But to read Tennyson’s _Maud_, Browning’s _Last Ride Together_, _A Woman’s Last Word_, _A Pretty Woman_, and _The Lost Mistress_, to choose four of his representative love poems, Rossetti’s _House of Life_, and Mrs. Browning’s _Sonnets from the