his own land, and chiefly of the places where he lived. It was quite
excellent, but it was limited. But, within the limit of England, it was
steeped in the love of England; and so sweet and full is this love, and
so lovely are its results in song, that every Englishman has, for this
reason if for no other, a deep and just affection for Tennyson.
Nevertheless, in that point also his poetry was insular. A fault in the
poet, not in the poetry. Perhaps, from this passionate concentration,
the poetry was all the lovelier.

Again, when Tennyson took a great gest of war as his subject, he took it
exclusively from the history of his own land. No one would know from his
writings that high deeds of sacrifice in battle had been done by other
nations. He knew of them, but he did not care to write about them. Nor
can we trace in his work any care for national struggles or national
life beyond this island--except in a few sonnets and short pieces
concerning Poland and Montenegro--an isolation of interests which cannot
be imputed to any other great poet of the first part of the nineteenth
century, excepting Keats, who had no British or foreign interests. Keats
had no country save the country of Beauty.

At all these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He never displayed
a special patriotism. On the contrary, he is more Italian than English,
and he is more quick to see and sympathise with the national
characteristics of Spain or France or Germany, than he is with those of
England. No insular feeling prevented him from being just to foreigners,
or from having a keen pleasure in writing about them. _Strafford_ is the
only play he wrote on an English subject, and it is rather a study of a
character which might find its place in any aristocracy than of an
English character. Even Pym and Hampden fail to be truly English, and it
would have been difficult for any one but Browning to take their eminent