We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively by his imagery. Tennyson is
hardly a great master of imagery. He has more imagination than imagery.
He sees the thing, with so luminous a mind's eye, that it is sufficient
to him; he needs not to see it more beautifully by a similitude. "A
clear-walled city" is enough; "meadows" are enough--indeed Tennyson
reigns for ever over all meadows; "the happy birds that change their
sky"; "Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night"; "Twilight and evening
bell"; "the stillness of the central sea"; "that friend of mine who lives
in God"; "the solitary morning"; "Four grey walls and four grey towers";
"Watched by weeping queens"; these are enough, illustrious, and needing
not illustration.

If we do not see Tennyson to be the lonely, the first, the _one_ that he
is, this is because of the throng of his following, though a number that
are of that throng hardly know, or else would deny, their flocking. But
he added to our literature not only in the way of cumulation, but by the
advent of his single genius. He is one of the few fountain-head poets of
the world. The new landscape which was his--the lovely unbeloved--is, it
need hardly be said, the matter of his poetry and not its inspiration. It
may have seemed to some readers that it is the novelty, in poetry, of
this homely unscenic scenery--this Lincolnshire quality--that accounts
for Tennyson's freshness of vision. But it is not so. Tennyson is fresh
also in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the things that others have
outworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves, what you will that is
conventional. Where are there more divinely poetic lines than those,
which will never be wearied with quotation, beginning, "A splendour
falls"? What castle walls have stood in such a light of old romance,
where in all poetry is there a sound wilder than that of those faint
"horns of elfland"? Here is the remoteness, the beyond, the light
delirium, not of disease but of more rapturous and delicate health, the