ral
poetry at its best; seeing inanimate nature is not in itself sufficient
theme for poetry, lacking passion, depth, power. Sunrise, and flowing
stream, and tossing seas are valuable as associates of the soul and
helping it to self-understanding. Tennyson took both men and nature
into his interpretation of nature. His voice it is, saying,

"O would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me!"

The sea helps the soul's lack by supplying words and music. Tennyson
never was at his best in a National Ode, unless one speaks from the
elocutionary standpoint, because such tasks lack the poetical essential
of spontaneity, and because, too, the themes seem to carry him outside
of his nature-mood. Art in our century has gone out of doors. Scenery
has never had lovers as now; and participative in this mood is
Tennyson. He lives under the sky. He loved to be alone; and nature is
loneliness as well as loveliness. Nor is his love of nature a passing
passion, but is passionate, intense, endearing. He never outgrew it.
"Balin and Balan" is as beautiful with nature-similes as were "Enid"
and "Oenone." In Tennyson we have the odors of the country and the sea
and the dewy night. He is laureate of the stars. Nature is not
introduced, but his poems seem set in nature as daisies in a meadow.
He was no city poet. Of the poet Blake, James Thomson writes:

"He came to the desert of London town
Gray miles long.
He wandered up, he wandered down,
Singing a quiet hymn."

Not so Tennyson. London and he were compatriots, but not friends; for
he belonged to the quiet of the country woods, and the clamor of
sea-gulls and sea-waves, whose very tumult drown the voice of care.
Tennyson was to express the yearning of his era, and his poems are a
cry; for, like a babe, he has

"No language but a cry."

Our yearning is our glory. The superb forces of our spirits are
inarticulate, and can not be put to words, but may be put to the melody
of a yearning cry. Souls struggle toward expression like a dying
soldier who would send a message to his beloved, but can not frame
words therefor before he dies. Our pathos is--and our yearning is--

"O would that my lips could utter
The thoughts that arise in me!"

But we have no words; and Holmes, in his most delicately-beautiful
poem, entitled "The Voiceless," has made mention of this grief:

"We count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet waili