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LYRICAL POETRYquite acclimatised in England. It is rather to Danteand the Italians that Rossetti, this English poet ofItalian blood, goes back.These were the two main currents that were flowing,carrying men away from their moorings, Protestantand Christian, in ways that distressed and agitatedthe older poets Tennyson and Browning—on the onehand the appeal or the repulsion excited by an everwideningemancipation from accepted beliefs, the onwardsweep of material science, and on the other theappeal of authority, a new view of the ages of faithand devotion if also of other things, the call of thegreat tradition of mediaeval faith and worship and artand poetry. The subject of the next two lectures willbe the influence of these forces on the thought andfeeling, and also on the art, the virtuosity, of the laterpoets of the century.VARNOLD AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITEGROUPTHE stress which Matthew Arnold laid upon what hecalled "the classical school in poetry" need not blindus to the fact that the spirit of his own poetry isromantic through and through. In his survey, Byronand Wordsworth were the great forces in the romanticmovement, and the tone of his own elegiac poetry isin truth more Byronic than Wordsworthian. Arnold'smelancholy is a melancholy "compounded of manysimples," of which the Byronic strain deepened by thecontinental inheritors of Byron's discontent is the chiefelement. What he was in revolt against was not really90