their readiest gifts being words more than ideas, versification more
than thought, form more than substance, they turn out verse,
chiefly narrative, which captivates through its easy flow, its smooth
sensuousness of diction, its gloss. Take a poet so celebrated, in some
respects so admirable, as Tennyson. Tennyson's verse is apt to be too
richly dressed, too perfumed. The clothing is costlier than the
thoughts can pay for. Hence at every re-reading of him he parts with
some of his strength, so that after three or four repetitions he has
little left for you. From a similar cause this is the case too with
Byron, through whose pen to common sentiment and opinion a glow is
imparted by the animal heat of the man, heightened by poetic tints
from a keen sense of the beautiful. But this is not the case with
Keats or Shelley or Coleridge or Wordsworth, and of course therefore
not with Milton or Shakespeare. All these keep fresh, at every contact
giving you strength and losing none. As freely and freshly as the
sun's beams through a transparent, upspringing Gothic spire, intellect
and feeling play, ever undimmed, through Shelley's "Sky-Lark." Not so
through Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women." After a time these
mellifluous stanzas droop, and cling to the paper: they have not
enough flame-like motion. The nicest word-choosing will not
supply the place of choice in thought, a choice prompted by fresh
feeling; nor, where there is no new impulse from the heart, will the
most gorgeous diction give to a line the poetic carnation. There can
be no freshness of expression without freshness of thought; the
sparkle on the skin comes from new blood in the heart.

Tennyson's poetry has often too much leaf and spray for the branches,
and too much branch for the trunk, and too much trunk for the roots.
There is not living stock enough of thought deeply set in emotion to
keep the leaves ever fresh and fragrant. Wordsworth's poetry has for