a league, and thin themselves
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing."

"Belted his body with her white embrace."

"And out beyond into the dream to come."

"Thus, as a hearth lit in a mountain home,
And glancing on the window, when the gloom
Of twilight deepens round it, seems a flame
That rages in the woodland far below."

Looking at these landscapes, can words add weight to the claim for
Alfred Tennyson as a painter?

And Tennyson is as pure as the air of mid-ocean. His moral qualities
are in no regard inferior to his artistic qualities, although from
centuries of poets we might have been schooled to anticipate that so
sensitive and poetic a nature had been sensual, concluding a lowered
standard of ethics, theoretical or practical, one or both, especially
considering his earliest literary admiration was that poetic Don Juan,
Lord Byron, whose poems were a transcript of his morals, where a
luxuriant imagination and a poetic diction were combined in a high
degree, and so the poet qualified to be a bane or blessing of a
commanding order, he choosing so to use his extraordinary gifts as to
pollute the living springs from which a generation of men and women
drank. What we do find is, a Tennyson as removed from a Byron in moral
mood and life as southern cross from northern lights. The morals of
both life and poems are as limpid as the waters of pellucid Tahoe; and
purest women may read from "Claribel" to "Crossing the Bar," and be
only purer from the reading. Henry Van Dyke has written on "The Bible
in Tennyson," an article, after his habit, discriminating and
appreciative, in the course of which he shows how some of the delicious
verse's of the laureate are literal extracts from the Book of God, so
native is poetry to that sublime volume; though I incline to believe
the larger loan of the Bible to Tennyson is the purity of thought
evidenced in the poet's writings, and more particularly in the poet's
life. Who has not been touched by the Bible who has lived in these
later centuries? Modern life may no more get away from the Bible than
our planet may flee from its own atmosphere. We can never estimate the
moral potency of such a poet, living and writing for sixty years,
though we may fairly account this longevity of pure living and pure
thinking and pure writing among the primary blessings of our century.
That two such pure men and poets as Tennyson and Brow