Mr. Copeland's Lecture.

Mr. Copeland gave a delightful lecture last evening on Tennyson and Browning.

Both Tennyson and Browning, Mr. Copeland said, have done more than express the feeling of the moment. They have expressed the poetic feeling of the second half of the nineteenth century, just as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge have done for the first half. From a standpoint of substance, rather than of form, Tennyson and Browning stand at opposite poles. Tennyson represents the spirit of science and law, while Browning represents the individual having his own way in spite of the law. In neither of them can we find the observation of nature and sympathy with it that Wordsworth has or the Pagan gift of union with it that Shelley has. Nor in them shall we find the mystic imagination of Coleridge. And neither of them sees things in the picture-like sense that Keats does. Almost all of these gifts are found however in a less degree in both these poets. Browning has far less of the picture-like sense than Tennyson. Whatever of these gifts these poets may lack, we find in each of them a real poetic breadth, which goes far to make up for the feelings in which they are deficient.

From the first it is the feeling of law which governs Tennyson. Even in "In Memoriam," an ode to a dead friend, who was far dearer to him than any one else in the world, we find a gradual swaying back to the spirit of law, until the personal disappears completely. The tendency of Tennyson is to glorify restraint rather than indulgence. He shows his great hero, the Iron Duke of Wellington who represents legal and just power, making head against lawlessness in the person of Napoleon. For this reason perhaps Tennyson has given us less of music and art, because it is the custom of the artist to follow his own bent and let the critic supply the laws.

Robert Browning was by nature an optimist, and his large, hearty hopefulness shows in every thing he did. While the hero of Tennyson was the man who followed duty, the hero of Browning followed the wishes of his own heart.