division.  A man must be on either one side or the other; Wordsworth, though he wrote on till 1850, is on the further side, Carlyle, though he was born in the same year as Keats, on the hither side.  Still the accident of length of days must not blind us to the fact that the Victorian period, though in many respects its ideals and modes of thinking differed from those of the period which preceded it, is essentially an extension of the Romantic Revival and not a fresh start.  The coherent inspiration of romanticism disintegrated into separate lines of development, just as in the seventeenth century the single inspiration of the Renaissance broke into different schools.  Along these separate lines represented by such men as Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, Arnold, and Meredith, literature enriched and elaborated itself into fresh forms.  None the less, every author in each of these lines of literary activity invites his readers to understand his direct relations to the romantic movement.  Rossetti touches it through his original, Keats; Arnold through Goethe and Byron; Browning first through Shelley and then in item after item of his varied subject-matter.

In one direction the Victorian age achieved a salient and momentous advance.  The Romantic Revival had been interested in nature, in the past, and in a lesser degree in art, but it had not been interested in men and women.  To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the lakes were part of the scenery they moved in; he saw men as trees walking, and when he writes about them as in such great poems as Resolution and Independence, the Brothers, or Michael, it is as natural objects he treats them, invested with the lonely remoteness that separates them from the complexities and passions of life as it is lived.  They are there, you feel, to teach the same lesson as the landscape teaches in which they are set.  The passing of the old Cumberland beggar through villages and past farmsteads, brings to those who see him the same kind of consolation as the impulses from a vernal wood that Wordsworth celebrated in his purely nature poetry.  Compare with Wordsworth, Browning, and note the fundamental change in the attitude of the poet that his work reveals. Pippa Passes is a poem on exactly the same scheme as the Old Cumberland Beggar, but in treatment no two things could be further apart.  The intervention of Pippa is dramatic, and though her song is in the same key as the wordless message of Wordsworth’s beggar she is a world apart from him, because she is something not out of natural history, but out of life.  The Victorian age extended the imaginative sensibility which its predecessor had brought to bear on nature and history, to the complexities of human life.  It searched for individuality in character, studied it with a loving minuteness, and built up out of its discoveries amongst men and women a body of literature which in its very mode of conception was more closely related to life, and