the vapid utterance made by one of these gentry that all "Reformers
should be annihilated," Imagine Plato or Epicurus offering such a
suggestion. O tempora! O mores!]

"To those who are too strongly possessed with our common habit of
classifying writers into kinds, as historians, poets, scientific and
speculative writers, and so on, it may seem strange to include Mr.
Tennyson in this list. But as I have advisedly referred to Wordsworth
as one of the representatives and powers of British philosophy in the
age immediately past, so I advisedly named Tennyson as succeeding him
in the same character. Though it is not power of speculative reason
alone that constitutes a poet, is it not felt that the worth of a poet
essentially is measured by the depth and amount of his speculative
reason? Even popularly, do we not speak of every great poet as the
exponent of the spirit of his age? What else can this mean than that
the philosophy of his age, its spirit and heart in relation to all the
great elemental problems, find expression in his verse? Hence I ought
to include other poets in this list, and more particularly Mr.
Browning and Mrs. Browning, and the late Mr. Clough. But let the
mention of Mr. Tennyson suggest such other names, and stand as a
sufficient protest against our absurd habit of omitting such in a
connection like the present. As if, forsooth, when a writer passed
into verse, he were to be abandoned as utterly out of calculable
relationship to all on this side of the boundary, and no account were
to be taken of his thoughts and doings, except in a kind of curious
appendix at the end of the general register? What if philosophy, at a
certain extreme range, and of a certain kind, tends of necessity to
pass into poesy, and can hardly help being passionate and metrical? If
so, might not the omission of poets, purely as being such, from a
conspectus of the speculative writers of any time, lead to erroneous