SOURCE: “Buchanan and Noel,” in Religious Trends in English Poetry, Vol. IV: 1830-1880, Christianity and Romanticism in the Victorian Era, Columbia University Press, 1957, pp. 216-39.

In the following essay, Fairchild compares the treatment of religious subjects and themes in the works of Buchanan and Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel.

Although several of the Seers and Seekers are writers of some literary as well as historical interest, none of them occupies so important a position on the main highway of English poetry as to deserve a separate chapter. Two of them, however, are so rewarding to the student of spiritual pathology that they are worth particular attention. It will not be inappropriate to couple the names of Robert Williams Buchanan (1841-1901) and Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel (1834-1894).¹ They were personal friends and sympathetic interpreters of each other's work.² To some extent both were continuators of the Spasmodic tradition—Buchanan more...