ck on the Victorian doctrine of laissez-faire as applied to the relations between the employer and his workers, and it aroused widespread indignation. From that moment the tone of his writings became more and more prophetic and increasingly diffuse, until his autobiography, Praeterita (1885-89), which showed all his former mastery of words. Later 19th-century poets carried on the tradition of their romantic predecessors; in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett and the relatively obscure poet Robert Browning formed their celebrated partnership. Today, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's fame has declined, and "the man who married Elizabeth Barrett" has completely overshadowed her. His two-volume work Men and Women (1855) reveals his talents at their highest point. An intellectual, speculative, and discursive poet who showed a novelist's preoccupation with the complexities of human character, he was also a fine lyric poet. Both his shorter poems and his lengthy verse novels reveal a wondrous range of gifts.Alfred Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as poet laureate in 1850, but by that time his finest work had been done. The spirit of pagan melancholy that breathes through his early poems, for example "The Lotos-Eaters" (1832), had largely disappeared, and the feelings of poignant personal sorrow that inspired In Memoriam had eventually been stilled. Tennyson's verses remained as musical as ever, but their imaginative content slowly dwindled.With Matthew Arnold and the Pre-Raphaelite poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne the English Romantic Movement reached a not inglorious close. Arnold had a distinguished career as a poet, during which he produced Dover Beach and "The Scholar Gypsy," poignant lamentations over the plight of the faithless modern world; later, he became an influential modern critic. Culture and Anarchy is a brave defense of the standards he valued beauty and reason, "sweetnes...
