of
Tennyson's poetry, and the remainder will appear comparatively small.
Certainly we may affirm with safety that Tennyson was poet of the past.

You can get the poetry of the Alhambra only by moonlight; and to a mind
so wholly poetic as Tennyson's it seemed possible to get the poetry of
conduct only by seeing it in the moonlight of departed years. To-day
is matter-of-fact in dress and design; mediaevalism was fanciful,
picturesque, romantic. Chivalry was the poetry of the Christ in
civilization; and the knight warring to recover the tomb of God was the
poem among soldiers, and in entire consonance with his nature,
Tennyson's poetic genius flits back into the poetic days, as I have
seen birds flit back into a forest. In Tennyson's poetry two things
are clear. They are mediaeval in location; they are modern in temper.
Their geography is yesterday, their spirit is to-day; and so we have
the questions and thoughts of our era as themes for Tennyson's voice
and lute. His treatment is ancient: his theme is recent. He has given
diagnosis and alleviation of present sickness, but hides face and voice
behind morion and shield.

Tennyson celebrates the return to nature. This return "The Poet's
Song" voices:

"The rain had fallen, the Poet arose;
He passed by the town and out of the street;
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,
And waves of shadow went over the wheat,
And he sat him down in a lonely place,
And chanted a melody loud and sweet,
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,
And the lark drop down at his feet.

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
The snake slipt under a spray;
The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the prey;
And the nightingale thought, 'I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay;
For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away.'"

Away from palaces to solitude; out of cities to hedgerows and the woods
and wild-flowers,--there is the secret of perennial poetry. And
Tennyson is the climax of this dissent from Pope and Dryden as
elaborated in Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Thomson, and Wordsworth. The
best of this wine was reserved for the last of the feast; for Tennyson
appears to me the greatest of the nature poets. And this return to
nature, as the phrase goes, means taking this earth as a whole, which
we are to do more and still more. Thomson's poetry was not pasto