comes,
Or hath come, since the making of the world."

Considering the comparison, we must grant that, submitted to the
judgment of cold logic, the figure is superfluous and faulty; for, as a
simple matter of fact, a wind blowing where no one comes or has come
would be not so lonely as one blown across a habitable and inhabited
land. From the standpoint of common observation, the simile might be
set down as inaccurate. But who so blind as not to see that there is
no untruth nor superfluity in the poet's art? He means to give the air
of utter loneliness and sadness, and therefore pictures an untenanted
landscape, across whose lonely wastes a lonely wind pursues its lonely
way; and thus having saturated his thought with sadness, he transfers
the loneliness of the landscape to the winged winds. This seems to me
the very climacteric of exquisite artistic skill, and I am always
delighted to the point of laughter or of tears; for moods run together
in presence of such poetry. No poet of my knowledge so haunts the
illustrative. In reading him, so perfect are the pictures that your
fingers itch to play the artist's part, so you might shadow some beauty
on every page. Some painter, working after the manner of Turner's
"Rivers of France," might make himself immortal by devoting his life to
the adequate illustration of Tennyson. As his verses sing themselves,
so his poems picture themselves. He supplies you with painter's
genius. A verse or stanza needs but a frame to be a choice painting.
When told that the fool

"Danced like a withered leaf before the hall,"

we must see him, so vivid the scene, so lifelike the color.

I will hang some pictures up as in a gallery:

"Ever the weary wind went on,
And took the reed-tops as it went"

"I, that whole day,
Saw her no more, although I linger'd there
Till every daisy slept."

"Love with knit brows went by,
And with a flying finger swept my lips."

"Breathed like the covenant of a God, to hold
From thence through all the worlds."

"Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind,
And in her bosom bore the baby. Sleep."

"The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores."

"And in the fallow leisure of my life."

"Her voice fled always through the summer land;
I spoke her name alone. Thrice-happy days!
The flower of each, those moments when we met,
The crown of all, we met to part no more."

"Now, now, his footsteps sm