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