ose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

There, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makes
Browning's people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy illustrating an
old story. One of the most beautiful lines Tennyson ever wrote:

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing,

has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of the world's
romance.

Tennyson's art at its best, however, and in these two instances is art
founded upon art, not art founded upon life. We used to be asked to admire
the vivid observation shown in such lines as:

More black than ashbuds in the front of March;

and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that Tennyson had a quick eye
for the facts of nature. But such lines, however accurate, do not make a
man a poet. It is in his fine ornamental moods that Tennyson means most to
our imaginations nowadays--in the moods of such lines as:

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost.

The truth is, Tennyson, with all his rhetoric and with all his prosaic
Victorian opinions, was an aesthete in the immortal part of him no less
than were Rossetti and Swinburne. He seemed immense to his contemporaries,
because he put their doubts and fears into music, and was master of the
fervid rhetoric of the new gospel of Imperialism. They did not realize
that great poetry cannot be founded on a basis of perishable doubts and
perishable gospels. It was enough for them to feel that _In Memoriam_ gave
them soothing anchorage and shelter from the destructive hurricanes of
science. It was enough for them to thrill to the public-speech poetry of
_Of old sat Freedom on the Heights_, the patriotic triumph of _The Relief
of Lucknow_, the glorious contempt for foreigners exhibited in his
references to "the red fool-fury of the Seine." Is it any wonder that
during a great part of his life Tennyson was widely regarded as not only a
poet, but a teacher and a statesman? His sneering caricature of Bright as
the "broad-brimmed hawker of holy things" should have made it clear that
in politics he was but a party man, and that his political intelligence
was commonplace.

He was too deficient in the highest kind of imagination and intellect to
achieve the greatest things. He seldom or never stood aloof from his own