which we are at present considering, no haunting sense of anything. There is none of the magic, the mystical charm of Coleridge or of Rossetti in his lines. They are as clear cut as crystal, and as cold. One feels no rush of impetuous emotion behind the words, no uncontrollable outburst of imaginative force. Yet it is this that gives us the sense of a great poet, a vision of unknown vistas of the poet-soul flashing through the verse. Tennyson in his first period knows exactly what he wants to say, and says it in the best way. This is the side of him that has made him popular, and contrasts so favourably with the obscurity and incoherence of many of his compeers. Yet it has its weakness in the want of depth, want of soul-tone in his earlier work.
Akin to this clear-cut form was the accuracy and minuteness of observation which made him so successful a painter of domesticated Nature. His achievements in this direction may have been over-estimated. He is not immaculate; the songster nightingale is always with him, the female, not the male, as it is in Nature: he was probably misled by the myth of Philomela. But the minuteness and independence of his powers of observation are acknowledged on all hands, and go naturally with the clear vision of the artist in words. Yet here again the result is to impair the true
