Portuguese_, Patmore’s _Unknown Eros_, and Swinburne’s _Dolores_, is to pass through a succession of moods as different as they can well be in character and having nothing in common save that their attention is turned to one centre. And there is no likelihood of time slowly investing this heterogeneous body of poetry with a common character as it has done with the love poetry of past epochs. No formula can ever be invented that shall include the social conscience and romantic tenderness of _Maud_, Browning’s passionate but ruthless psychological subtlety, Rossetti’s entranced voluptuousness, the proud surrender of the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, Patmore’s transfigured worldliness and Swinburne’s enraptured embodiment of an abstract passion in a substantial image. In Victorian love poetry there is no dominant figure but that of love itself, but the theme is celebrated with an orchestral fullness that had never before been attained. Coming, as they did, after Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats, it cannot perhaps be claimed for the Victorian poets that they added notably to the spiritual revelation of nature, but it can be said in their praise that they were nearly all of them endowed with a very graphic gift of exact observation of the natural world. Victorian poetry is alight with phrases in which a natural mood or object is set down with the most tender and vivid precision. Tennyson’s planet of Love, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves On a bed of daffodil sky.... Mrs. Browning’s delicate landscape where sheep are cropping The slant grass and daisies pale, And five apple trees stand dropping Separate shadows toward the vale.... FitzGerald’s strip of herbage strown That just outside divides the desert from the sown.... Christina Rossetti’s image, as telling as one of Marvell’s, of the Green nest full of pleasant shade, Wherein three speckled eggs were laid.... Browning’s “pear hung basking over a wall,” Arnold’s Have I not pass’d thee on the wooden bridge Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow, Thy face towards Hinksey and its wintry ridge.... Patmore’s The buried bulb does know The signals of the year, And hails far summer with his lifted spear.... Morris’s I know a little garden close Set thick with lily and red rose.... and Rossetti’s “ground-whirl of the perished leaves of hope,” such things can be matched on almost any page of any considerable poet of the time. The age may have been not very much concerned with the interpretation of nature in Wordsworth’s prophetic sense, but the easy mastery over such images as those just given gave to the poetry of the time a common background of rich and varied natural beauty, very bright in line and colour. Chapter VI _Conclusion_