The same idea grew up of itself among the working classes, not only in England, but in Germany, Italy, France, America.

They began, and have continued, to lose their old belief in distinct and warring nationalities.

To denationalise the nations into one nation only--the nation of mankind--is too vast an idea to grow quickly, but in all classes, and perhaps most in the working class, there are an increasing number of thinking men who say to the varied nations, "We are all one; our interests, duties, rights, nature and aims are one." And, for my part, I believe that in the full development of that conception the progress of mankind is most deeply concerned, and will be best secured.
Now, when all these classes in England, brought to much the same point by different paths, seek for a poetry which is international rather than national, and which recognises no special country as its own, they do not find it in Tennyson, but they do find Browning writing, and quite naturally, as if he belonged to other peoples as much as to his own, even more than to his own.

And they also find that he had been doing this for many years before their own international interests had been awakened.

That, then, differentiates him completely from Tennyson, and is another reason why he was not read in the past but is read in the present.
9.