restored, but important changes, in the way of omission or addition,
became rare.

Of nature Tennyson was scrupulously observant till his very latest
days, eagerly noting, not only "effects," as a painter does, but
their causes, botanical or geological. Had man been scientific from
the beginning he would probably have evolved no poetry at all;
material things would not have been endowed by him with life and
passion; he would have told himself no stories of the origins of
stars and flowers, clouds and fire, winds and rainbows. Modern poets
have resented, like Keats and Wordsworth, the destruction of the old
prehistoric dreams by the geologist and by other scientific
characters. But it was part of Tennyson's poetic originality to see
the beautiful things of nature at once with the vision of early
poetic men, and of moderns accustomed to the microscope, telescope,
spectrum analysis, and so forth. Thus Tennyson received a double
delight from the sensible universe, and it is a double delight that
he communicates to his readers. His intellect was thus always
active, even in apparent repose. His eyes rested not from observing,
or his mind from recording and comparing, the beautiful familiar
phenomena of earth and sky. In the matter of the study of books we
have seen how deeply versed he was in certain of the Greek, Roman,
and Italian classics. Mr Jowett writes: "He was what might be
called a good scholar in the university or public-school sense of the
term, . . . yet I seem to remember that he had his favourite
classics, such as Homer, and Pindar, and Theocritus. . . . He was
also a lover of Greek fragments. But I am not sure whether, in later
life, he ever sat down to read consecutively the greatest works of
AEschylus and Sophocles, although he used occasionally to dip into
them." The Greek dramatists, in fact, seem to have affected