even the banality, of Longfellow,, and he could also wield the wand of Coleridge, or of Rossetti. There were so many Tennysons.
Of Tennyson the man the public know nothing; it was his dignified wish to live his life apart. The glimpses we catch of him reveal something akin to his own bluff English squires, tempered by even more than the usual share of poetic sensitiveness. This aloofness need only be here considered in reference to its consequences on his art. This cannot but have suffered from want of contact with the larger life, which made him impossible as a dramatist. But it prepared the way for the Seerhood of the closing period, and, above all, enabled him to live his life solely devoted to his glorious art.
No English poet impresses one with such a sense of continuous improvement in the technique of his vocation. At first the echoes resound: a phrase of Keats, a sentiment of Wordsworth, a rhythm of Byron, a lilt of Shelley or of Coleridge, experiments in metrical quantity—everywhere we find the poet testing all things poetical, and holding fast that which was good. Soon the individual accent comes, in the Palace of Art, in the Lotus Eaters, in The Epic, and the music strengthens and deepens till the last. No English poet but Milton shows so steady an
