the heaviness of the dramas. Dainty and exquisite in form, they have, besides that haunting charm, that imaginative atmosphere which is too often wanting in Tennyson's other work. Their melody is almost unsurpassed in our language, and they have received the homage of musicians in frequent settings. Yet I remember George Eliot saying to me, that, exquisite as they are, they are seldom suitable for singing, especially when compared with the Elizabethan lyrics which trill forth as naturally as from a bird. The collocations of consonants in Tennyson's lyrics often impede voice production. It is easy to explain the difference. The Elizabethans were writing for a nation of singers; Tennyson was writing for a people with whom singing is a lost art.
It was his lyrics that made him the popular poet he undoubtedly was. He was emphatically, for the Victorian era, the man that sang the nation's songs. If these were at times wanting in the finer harmonies and the more complex rhythms, that was no bar to their popularity—it was rather a condition of it. The critical problem of Tennyson's art, we have been told, is his simultaneous acceptance by mob and by dilettanti. The solution of the problem is a tolerably obvious one: he appealed to these different classes with different phases of his art. He could use the simplicity,
