closer secret of poetry. This most English of modern poets has been
taunted with his mere gardens. He loved, indeed, the "lazy lilies," of
the exquisite garden of "The Gardener's Daughter," but he betook his
ecstatic English spirit also far afield and overseas; to the winter
places of his familiar nightingale:-

When first the liquid note beloved of men
Comes flying over many a windy wave;

to the lotus-eaters' shore; to the outland landscapes of "The Palace of
Art"--the "clear-walled city by the sea," the "pillared town," the "full-
fed river"; to the "pencilled valleys" of Monte Rosa; to the "vale in
Ida"; to that tremendous upland in the "Vision of Sin":-

At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, Is there any hope?
To which an answer pealed from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand.

The Cleopatra of "The Dream of Fair Women" is but a ready-made Cleopatra,
but when in the shades of her forest she remembers the sun of the world,
she leaves the page of Tennyson's poorest manner and becomes one with
Shakespeare's queen:-

We drank the Libyan sun to sleep.

Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a great passage of style
rebukes our dislike and recalls our heart again. The dramas, less than
the lyrics, and even less than the "Idylls," are matter for the true
Tennysonian. Their action is, at its liveliest rather vivacious than