But by degrees to fullness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread."

But the anti-revolutionary and the institutional features
of Tennyson's poetry are not those of the higher ground of his poetry.
They are features which, though primarily due, it may be,
to the poet's temperament, are indirectly due to the particular form
of civilization in which he has lived, and moved, and had his culture,
and which he reflects more than any of his poetical contemporaries.

The most emphasized and most vitalized idea, the idea which
glints forth everywhere in his poetry, which has the most important
bearing on man's higher life, and which marks the height
of the spiritual tide reached in his poetry, is, that the highest
order of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality
of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive
or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which INFORMS his poem
of `The Princess'. It is prominent in `In Memoriam' and in
`The Idylls of the King'. In `The Princess', the Prince,
speaking of the relations of the sexes, says: --

"in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words;