His religious range was very much wider and wiser than his political;
but here also he suffered from treating as true universality a thing
that was only a sort of lukewarm local patriotism. Here also he
suffered by the very splendour and perfection of his poetical powers. He
was quite the opposite of the man who cannot express himself; the
inarticulate singer who dies with all his music in him. He had a great
deal to say; but he had much more power of expression than was wanted
for anything he had to express. He could not think up to the height of
his own towering style.

For whatever else Tennyson was, he was a great poet; no mind that feels
itself free, that is, above the ebb and flow of fashion, can feel
anything but contempt for the later effort to discredit him in that
respect. It is true that, like Browning and almost every other Victorian
poet, he was really two poets. But it is just to him to insist that in
his case (unlike Browning's) both the poets were good. The first is more
or less like Stevenson in metre; it is a magical luck or skill in the
mere choice of words. "Wet sands marbled with moon and cloud"--"Flits by
the sea-blue bird of March"--"Leafless ribs and iron horns"--"When the
long dun wolds are ribbed with snow"--in all these cases one word is the
keystone of an arch which would fall into ruin without it. But there are
other strong phrases that recall not Stevenson but rather their common
master, Virgil--"Tears from the depths of some divine despair"--"There
is fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate"--"Was a
great water; and the moon was full"--"God made Himself an awful rose of
dawn." These do not depend on a word but on an idea: they might even be
translated. It is also true, I think, that he was first and last a lyric
poet. He was always best when he expressed himself shortly. In long
poems he had an unfortunate habit of eventually saying very nearly the