k
whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--on such
grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more
than a fictitious sign and a false proof?

Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack upon
our reason and our heart. He is more serious than the solemn Wordsworth.

_In Memoriam_, with all else that Tennyson wrote, tutors, with here and
there a subtle word, this nature-loving nation to perceive land, light,
sky, and ocean, as he perceived. To this we return, upon this we dwell.
He has been to us, firstly, the poet of two geniuses--a small and an
immense; secondly, the modern poet who answered in the negative that most
significant modern question, French or not French? But he was, before
the outset of all our study of him, of all our love of him, the poet of
landscape, and this he is more dearly than pen can describe him. This
eternal character of his is keen in the verse that is winged to meet a
homeward ship with her "dewy decks," and in the sudden island landscape,

The clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.

It is poignant in the garden-night:-

A breeze began to tremble o'er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
. . .
And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rocked the full-foliaged elm, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said
"The dawn, the dawn," and died away.

His are the exalted senses that sensual poets know nothing of. I think
the sense of hearing as well as the sense of sight, has never been more
greatly exalted than by Tennyson:-

As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry.

As to this garden-character so much decried I confess that the "lawn"
does not generally delight me, the word nor the thing. But in Tennyson's
page the word is wonderful, as though it had never been dull: "The
mountain lawn was dewy-dark." It is not that he brings the mountains too
near or ranks them in his own peculiar garden-plot, but that the word
withdraws, withdraws to summits, withdraws into dreams; the lawn is
aloft, alone, and as wild as ancient snow. It is the same with many
another word or phrase changed, by passing into his vocabulary, into
something rich and strange. His own especially is the March month--his
"roaring moon." His is the spirit of the dawnin