both, and so clearly brought out in each, that we feel the Man in the
Prince, and the high aim of the Prince in the true Man. There is the
"grand, heroic soul" in Enoch as in Arthur,--

"Who reverenced his conscience as his king;
Whose glory was redressing human wrong;
Who spoke no slander, no, nor listened to it;
Who loved one only, and who clave to her."

Our poet never strays from Nature; which has for him two sides,--the old
duality, which is also forever,--the real and the ideal. To the one he
brings the most patient fidelity of study; the other he reflects in
every part of his poems in glowing imagery. "Enoch Arden" contains
scenes which a Pre-Raphaelite might draw from,--as that "cup-like hollow
in the down" which held the hazel-wood, with the children nutting
through its reluctant boughs, or the fireside of Philip, on which Enoch
looked and was desolate. On the other hand, no poet has so planted our
literature with gorgeous gardens from which generations of lesser
laborers will be enriched and prospered. The figures in which Tennyson
uses Nature are not, moreover, strained or artificial; they do not
distort or cover the inner meaning, but bloom from it, revealing its
beauty and its sweetness. All bear the mark of loving thought,--now so
delicate that its very faintness thrills and holds us, now strong and
spirited and solemn.

In this latest poem we find also the old surpassing skill of language, a
skill dependent on the faculty of penetrating to the inmost significance
both of words and of things, so that there is no waste, and so that
single words in single sentences stamp on the brain the substance of
long experiences. Witness this: Enoch lies sick, distant from home and
wife and children; here is one word crowded with pathos, telling of the
weary loss of livelihood, the burden slowly growing more intolerably
irksome to the bold and careful worker wrestling with pain, and to the
fragile mother of the new-born babe:--

"Another hand _crept_, too, across his trade,
Taking her bread and theirs."

See, again, how one line woven in the context shows where the tears
came. Enoch, wrecked, solitary, almost hopeless, found that

"A phantom made of many phantoms moved
Before him, haunting him,--or he himself
Moved, haunting people, things, and places known
Far in a darker isle beyond the line:
The babes, their babble, Annie, the small house,
The climbing street,