it is, the _completeness_ of this isolation from England was a
misfortune, not a strength, in his poetry.

There is another thing to say in this connection. The expansion of the
interests of the English poets beyond England was due in Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley, and partly in Byron, to the great tidal-wave of
feeling for man as man, which, rising long before the French Revolution,
was lifted into twice its height and dashed on the shore of the world
with overwhelming volume, by the earthquake in France of 1789. Special
national sentiments were drowned in its waters. Patriotism was the duty
of man, not to any one nation but to the whole of humanity, conceived of
as the only nation.

In 1832 there was little left of that influence in England among the
educated classes, and Tennyson's insular patriotism represented their
feeling for many years, and partly represents it now. But the ideas of
the Revolution were at the same time taking a wiser and more practical
form among the English democracy than they even had at their first
outburst in France, and this emerged, on one side of it, in the idea of
internationalism. It grew among the propertied classes from the greater
facilities of travel, from the wide extension of commercial, and
especially of literary, intercommunication. Literature, even more than
commerce, diminishes the oppositions and increases the amalgamation of
nations. On her lofty plane nations breathe an air in which their
quarrels die. The same idea grew up of itself among the working classes,
not only in England, but in Germany, Italy, France, America. They began,
and have continued, to lose their old belief in distinct and warring
nationalities. To denationalise the nations into one nation only--the
nation of mankind--is too vast an idea to grow quickly, but in all
classes, and perhaps most in the working class, there are an increasing