r, the more enduring truth.
With love, as with chivalry, he saw not the humor, but the beauty of
it; and beauty is always touched with melancholy. I have sat a day
through reading all this poet's verse, and confess that all the day I
was not remote from tears, but was as one walking in mists along an
ocean shore, so that on my face was what might be either rain or tears.
In Tennyson,

"Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in its
glowing hands;
Every moment lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the
chords with might;
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music
out of sight."

And Tennyson is the picture poet. I feel in reading him as if I were
either out of doors with pictures seen at first-hand, or in a gallery
with picture-crowded walls. He is painter among poets, his art being
at once admirably inclusive and exclusive--including essentials,
excluding the irrelevant. He is consummate artist, giving pictures of
things, and, what is vastly more difficult, pictures of moods. With
him, one never feels and sees, but feels because he sees. His ability
to recreate moods for us is quite beyond praise, and is such subtle art
as defies analysis or characterization, but wakens wonder and will not
let it sleep. Poets are, as is affirmed by the lord of all the poets,

"Of imagination all compact;"

and may we be delivered from a colorless world and an unimaginative
life; for such is no life at all! God would have men dream and
prophesy. Because the poet is artist and dreamer, his word, in one
form or another, is "like," a word patented by poets; and all who use
it are become, in so far, poets. Now, with Tennyson, all things
suggest pictures, as if soul were itself a landscape; wherefore, as has
been shown, he riots in nature-scenes. A simile, when full, like a
June day of heaven, contains a plethora, an ampleness, for which you
shall seek in vain to find rules, much less to make them; which is to
say that a perfect simile will betimes do something for which no reason
can be assigned, yet so answering to the largest poetry of the occasion
as to fill the mind with joy, as if one had discovered some new flower
in the woods where he thought he knew them all. One instance shall
suffice as illustrative:

"An agony
Of lamentation like a wind, that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one