eed. The human
beings in Browning's poem, however, are not mere shadows out of old
magazines; they are as real as the men and women in the portraits of the
masters, as real as ourselves. Similarly, in expressing his thought,
Browning gives it imaginative dignity as philosophy, while Tennyson writes
what is after all merely an exalted leading article. There is more in
common between Tennyson and Lytton than is generally realized. Both were
fond of windy words. They were slaves of language to almost as great an
extent as Swinburne. One feels that too often phrases like "moor and fell"
and "bower and hall" were mere sounding substitutes for a creative
imagination. I have heard it argued that the lines in _Maud_:

All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;

introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ball-room orchestra
merely for the sake of euphony. The mistake about the bassoon is a small
one, and is, I suppose, borrowed from Coleridge, but it is characteristic.

Tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he was
generally accepted as being. He was an artist of lines rather than of
poems. He seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring full-armed from the
imagination as the great poems of the world do. He built them up
haphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels. They are full of sententious
padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher's
vacuous babbling in his sleep, as so much of Wordsworth is; it is the
word-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, or
things. Let us admit at once that when Tennyson is word perfect he takes
his place among the immortals. One may be convinced that the bulk of his
work is already as dead as the bulk of Longfellow's work. But in his great
poems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect form, and expressed
it perfectly. He did this in _Ulysses_, which comes nearer a noble
perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. One can imagine the
enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson
is as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines
hackneyed for us by much quotation:

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purp