The Oxford movement ministered to the same tendencies in religion and philosophy; but it is the scientific spirit, and all that the scientific spirit implied, its certain doubt, its care for minuteness, and truth of observation, its growing interest in social processes, and the conditions under which life is lived, that is the central fact in Victorian literature.
Tennyson represents more fully than any other poet this essential spirit of the age.

If it be true, as has been often asserted, that the spirit of an age is to be found best in the work of lesser men, his complete identity with the thought of his time is in itself evidence of his inferiority to his contemporary, Browning.

Comparison between the two men seem inevitable; they were made by readers when _In Memoriam_ and _Men and Women_ came hot from the press, and they have been made ever since.

There could, of course, scarcely be two men more dissimilar, Tennyson elaborating and decorating the obvious; Browning delving into the esoteric and the obscure, and bringing up strange and unfamiliar finds; Tennyson in faultless verse registering current newly accepted ways of thought; Browning in advance thinking afresh for himself, occupied ceaselessly in the arduous labour of creating an audience fit to judge him.

The age justified the accuracy with which Tennyson mirrored it, by accepting him and rejecting Browning.