number of thinking men who say to the varied nations, "We are all one;
our interests, duties, rights, nature and aims are one." And, for my
part, I believe that in the full development of that conception the
progress of mankind is most deeply concerned, and will be best secured.

Now, when all these classes in England, brought to much the same point
by different paths, seek for a poetry which is international rather than
national, and which recognises no special country as its own, they do
not find it in Tennyson, but they do find Browning writing, and quite
naturally, as if he belonged to other peoples as much as to his own,
even more than to his own. And they also find that he had been doing
this for many years before their own international interests had been
awakened. That, then, differentiates him completely from Tennyson, and
is another reason why he was not read in the past but is read in the
present.

9. Again, with regard to politics and social questions, Tennyson made us
know what his general politics were, and he has always pleased or
displeased men by his political position. The British Constitution
appears throughout his work seated like Zeus on Olympus, with all the
world awaiting its nod. Then, also, social problems raise their
storm-awakening heads in his poetry: the Woman's Question; War;
Competition; the State of the Poor; Education; a State without Religion;
the Marriage Question; where Freedom lies; and others. These are brought
by Tennyson, though tentatively, into the palace of poetry and given
rooms in it.

At both these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He was not the
politician, not the sociologist, only the poet. No trace of the British
Constitution is to be found in his poetry; no one could tell from it