sea-shine to thine inland lair:
Whose freedom clothed the naked souls of slaves
And stripped the muffled souls of tyrants bare:
O! by the centuries of thy glorious graves,
By the live light of th' earth that was thy care,
Live! thou must not be dead!
Live! let thine armoured head
Lift itself to sunward and the fair
Daylight of time and man,
Thine head republican,
With the same splendour on thine helmless hair
Within his eyes kept up a light,
Who on thy glory gazed away their sacred sight.

These verses might almost be the verses of a Greek. And this is true not
merely of the art and grace of form; it is equally true of the mental
condition of the writer. The sentiment is intellectually just, and the
expression is artistically just. Exhortation there is, a certain ardour
there is, but it is the sober and restrained ardour of the Greeks; it is
not Hebraic. But I read again of how the Armada flies:--

Torn by the scourge of the storm-wind that smites as a harper smites
on a lyre,
And consumed of the storm as the sacrifice, loved of their God, is
consumed with fire,
And devoured of the darkness as men that are slain in the fires of his
love are devoured,
And deflowered of their lives by the storms as by priests is the spirit
of life deflowered.

And here is neither Hellenic seasonableness and proportion, nor Hebraic
fervour, nor truth as it is understood by either Hebrew or Hellene. It
is the work of a man who endeavours to lash himself into an intensity
which is not of him, and who trifles with a Hebraism which rejects him.

Tennyson is, in point of the adaptation of form to matter, in the
absolute justice and delicacy of his diction, in the perfect proportion
and symmetry of his images, the completest reproduction among moderns of
the Hellenic literary artist. What could be more luminously seen or more
luminously expressed than

The curled white of the coming wave,
Glassed in the slippery sand before it breaks?

Hellenic Tennyson is also in his appreciation of all beauty. More
important, he is Hellenic in his tranquil open-eyed outlook upon the
world. It is in these things that he is his best self. He is least
himself when he seeks to pass into the prophetic sphere. He is _poeta_
more than _vates_, and he is least Tennysonian in a poem like "Maud."
The Hebraic element in Tennyson is not innate, it is but what he has
gathered from his training in Hebraic mor