In its structural foundations, therefore, Victorian verse in England may be said to be a direct inheritance from the Romantic age, and through it from the longer general ancestry of English poetry. The body of fine work done between Victoria’s succession and the death of Tennyson is sufficient proof that the poetic instinct of the race knew very well what it was about in this. At the same time, the more restless talents were sometimes troubled by allegiance to forms that, whatever their virtue, had no longer the first flush of inventive delight. The sombre, charnel-house genius of a Webster, the rugged, almost fierce, intellectual power of a Ben Jonson, the religious ecstasy of a Vaughan, the tender irresponsibility of a Lovelace or a Suckling, and the spiritual ingenuity of a Donne, were all alike content to work in the simplest lyric forms, and were able to find complete expression through these, because as forms they were still fresh enough to be for each man treasure-trove. Nowhere in the whole range of passion and wit and subtle argument was there a mood to be found that wanted at any time to break the mould. To a large extent this has remained true until our own day, but as time has gone on a poet has now and again suddenly, as it were, become too conscious of the long service already done by the more established measures and has been tempted into irregularities which have sometimes been admirable in result and have sometimes tumbled over into excesses only to be forgotten. A great deal of Browning’s verse is the result of some such uneasiness in his mind, a fear lest he should accept tradition too easily, a deliberate realisation on his part that a poet has to be original. Browning’s genius could stand the strain, but a strain it was. Matthew Arnold’s experiments in free verse have much the same origin. He, again, justified himself, but without doing anything to show that the main traditions in which he worked habitually were becoming less important to English poetry. In the case of Whitman, the one example in the Victorian age of a great poetic genius working consistently without respect for the established practice of English verse, there is no doubt that to minds and ears aware of all that custom has achieved, a great energy denied itself more than half its effect.