. But
there are descriptive passages in them also which neither Keats nor
Wordsworth could have written, combining the honest sensuous
observation which is common to them both, with a self-restrained
simplicity which Keats did not live long enough to attain, and a
stately and accurate melody, an earnest songfulness (to coin a word)
which Wordsworth seldom attained, and from his inaccurate and
uncertain ear, still seldomer preserved without the occurrence of a
jar or a rattle, a false quantity, a false rapture, or a bathos. And
above all, or rather beneath all--for we suspect that this has been
throughout the very secret of Mr. Tennyson's power--there was a hush
and a reverent awe, a sense of the mystery, the infinitude, the
awfulness, as well as of the mere beauty of wayside things, which
invested these poems as wholes with a peculiar richness, depth, and
majesty of tone, beside which both Keats's and Wordsworth's methods
of handling pastoral subjects looked like the colouring of Julio
Romano or Watteau by the side of Correggio or Titian.

This deep simple faith in the divineness of Nature as she appears,
which, in our eyes, is Mr. Tennyson's differentia, is really the
natural accompaniment of a quality at first sight its very opposite,
and for which he is often blamed by a prosaic world; namely, his
subjective and transcendental mysticism. It is the mystic, after
all, who will describe Nature most simply, because he sees most in
her; because he is most ready to believe that she will reveal to
others the same message which she has revealed to him. Men like
Behmen, Novalis, and Fourier, who can soar into the inner cloud-world
of man's spirit, even though they lose their way there, dazzled by
excess of wonder--men who, like Wordsworth, can give utterance to
such subtle anthropologic wisdom as the "Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality," will for that very reason most humbly and patiently
"consider the lilies of the field, how they grow." And even so it is
just because Mr. Tennyson is, far more than Wordsworth, mystical, and
what an ignorant and money-getting generation, idolatrous of mere
sensuous activity, calls "dreamy," that he has become the greatest
naturalistic poet which England has seen for several centuries. The
same faculty which enabled him to draw such subtle subjective
pictures of womanhood as Adeline, Isabel, and Eleanor, enabled him to
see, and therefore simply to describe, in one of the most distinc