matter of choice of clear, simple words and phrases is very important.
For, just so much as our attention is drawn from what a poet says to the
medium, the language in which he says it, so much is its clearness
injured. Vividly to see pictures in our imagination or to be affected by
our emotions, we must not, as we read, experience any jar. In Tennyson
we never have to think of his expressions--except to admire their simple
beauty. Simplicity and beauty, then, are two noticeable qualities of his
poetry."--_Charles Read Nutter_.

"An idyllic or picturesque mode of conveying his sentiments is the one
natural to Tennyson, if not the only one permitted by his limitations.
He is a born observer of physical nature, and, whenever he applies an
adjective to some object or passingly alludes to some phenomenon which
others have but noted, is almost infallibly correct. He has the unerring
first touch which in a single line proves the artist; and it justly has
been remarked that there is more true English landscape in many an
isolated stanza of _In Memoriam_ than in the whole of _The Seasons_, that
vaunted descriptive poem of a former century."--_Edmund Clarence Stedman_.

"In describing scenery, his microscopic eye and marvellously delicate ear
are exercised to the utmost in detecting the minutest relations and most
evanescent melodies of the objects before him, in order that his
representation shall include everything which is important to their full
perfection. His pictures of rural English scenery give the inner spirit
as well as the outward form of the objects, and represent them, also, in
their relation to the mind which is gazing on them. The picture in his
mind is spread out before his detecting and dissecting intellect, to be
transformed to words only when it can be done with the most refined
exactness, both as regards color and form and melody."--_E.P. Whipple_.