ennyson was a solitary. Hallam Tennyson's biography of the laureate
resents the opinion that his father was unsocial, but really leaves the
commonly-received opinion unrefuted. Tennyson's reticence and love of
contemplation and aloneness amounted to a passion. He was not a man of
the people. He fled from tourists as if they brought a plague with
them. He did nothing but dream. You might as easily catch the
whip-poor-will, whose habitation changes at an approaching step, as
Tennyson. His was not in the widest sense a companionable nature. He
cared to be alone and to be let dream, and resented intrusion and a
disturbance of his solitude. Some have dreamless sleep, like the
princess in "The Sleeping Beauty;" others sleep to dream, and to wake
them by a hand's touch or a voice, however loved, would be to break the
sweet continuity of their dreams. Seeing Tennyson was as he was, his
solitude helped him. I think moonlight was wine to his spirit, and the
dim voices of rolling breakers heard afar woke his passion and his
poetry. The

"Break, break, break,
On thy cold, gray stones, O sea!"

was what his spirit needed as qualification to

"Utter the thoughts that arise in me."

A dramatist needs the touching of living hands and sound of living
human voices, the uproar of the human sea; for is he not poet of street
and court and market-place and holiday? But there is a poetry which
needs these accessories as little as a lover needs a throng to keep him
company. Tennyson's poetry was such. We are not to conceive him as
Lord Tennyson and inhabitant of the House of Lords. He did not belong
there save as a recognition of splendid ability. If we are to get a
clew to his genius, he must always be conceived as a recluse, who truly
heard the world's words, but at a dim remove. There is remoteness in
his poetry. The long ago was the day whose sunlight flooded his path.
The illustrious Greek era and the Mediaeval Age were fields where his
hosts mustered for battle. Consider how little of Tennyson's noblest
poetry belongs to his own era. "The May Queen;" "Locksley Hall," and
its complement, "Sixty Years After;" "In a Hospital Ward;" "The
Grandmother;" his patriotic effusions; "Maud;" and "In Memoriam," sum
up the modern contributions; nor is all of this impregnated with a
genuinely modern spirit. "Enoch Arden" might have belonged to a
lustrum of centuries ago, and "The May Queen" to remote decades. He
wr