large areas
of thought and feeling into a single sentence or a few verses, which
presents the quintessence of the lyric method. Immense passion poured
into the chalice of a solitary utterance--this is a song. Let the
harpist sit and sing, nor stop to wipe his tears what time he
sings,--only let him sing! Tennyson was as some rare voice which never
grows husky, but always sounds sweet as music heard in the darkness,
and when he speaks, it is as if

"Up the valley came a swell of music on the wind."

Tennyson is poet of love. Love is practically always the soil out of
which his flowers grow. Our American bards say little of love, and we
feel the lack keenly. Love is the native nobleman among
soul-qualities, and we have become schooled to feel the poets must be
our spokesmen here where we need them most. But Bryant, nor Whittier,
nor Longfellow, nor yet Lowell, have been in a generous way erotic
poets. They have lacked the pronounced passion element. Poe, however,
was always lover when he wrote poetry, and Bayard Taylor has a
recurring softening of the voice to a caress when his eyes look love.
Tennyson, on the contrary, is scarcely less a love poet than Burns,
though he tells his secret after a different fashion. Call the roll of
his poems, and see how just this observation is. Love is nodal with
him as with the heart. Bourdillon was right in saying:

"The night has a thousand eyes,
The day has one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the life of a whole life dies
When love is done."

In many poets, love is background, not picture, or, to change a figure
as is meet, love is a minor chord in song. In Shelley, I would say
that love was a sort of afterglow upon the landscape, and softens his
rigid anarchy into something like beauty. With Tennyson is a very
different offering to love. It is omnipresent, though not obtrusively
so; for he never obtrudes his main meanings. They rather steal on you
as springtime does. You catch his meaning because you are not blind
nor deaf. He hints at things as lovers do, and is as one who would not
thrust his company upon you, so modest and reticent is he; yet we do
not mistake him. Love is always close at hand, and in some form is
never absent. "Mariana," "Lady of Shalott," "Locksley Hall," "Maud,"
"The Sisters," "The Talking Oak," "Edward Gray," "The Mi