It makes vivid and intense his scholarly handling of Greek myth; always the unchanging human aspect of it attracts him most, in Oenone's grief, in the indomitableness of Ulysses, the weariness and disillusionment in Tithonus.

It has been the cause of the comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his generation takes such a human attitude to death.

Shelley could yearn for the infinite, Browning treat it as the last and greatest adventure, Arnold meet it clear eyed and resigned.

To Wordsworth it is the mere return of man the transient to Nature the eternal.
"No motion has she now; no force, She neither hears nor sees, Roiled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees." To Tennyson it brings the fundamental human home-sickness for familiar things.
"Ah, sad and strange as on dark summer dawns, The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds To dying ears when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square." It is an accent which wakes an echo in a thousand hearts.
(2) While Tennyson, in his own special way and, so to speak, in collaboration with the spirit of the age, was carrying on the work of Romanticism on its normal lines, Browning was finding a new style and a new subject matter.

In his youth he had begun as an imitator of Shelley, and _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_ remain to show what the influence of the "sun-treader" was on his poetry.