Tennyson has suffered no loss of fame, but he has suffered of late
a certain loss of influence, which was bound to come, if simply
from the tremendous domination which his writings exercised in his
lifetime. He was undoubtedly one of the first word-artists who ever
lived and wrote, but he was a great deal more than that; he was a
great mystic, a man whose mind moved in a shining cloud of
inspiration. He had the constitution and the temperament of a big
Lincolnshire yeoman, with that simple rusticity that is said to
have characterised Vergil. But his spirit dwelt apart, revolving
dim and profound thoughts, brooding over mysteries; if he is
lightly said to be Early Victorian, it is not because he was
typical of his age, but because he contributed so much to make it
what it was. While Browning lived an eager personal life, full of
observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson abode in more impersonal
thoughts. In the dawn of science, when there was a danger of life
becoming over-materialised, contented with the first steps of
swiftly apprehended knowledge, and with solutions which were no
solutions at all, but only the perception of laws, Tennyson was the
man of all others who saw that science had a deeply poetical side,
and could enforce rather than destroy the religious spirit; he saw
that a knowledge of processes was not the same thing as an
explanation of impulses, and that while it was a little more clear
in the light of science what was actually happening in the world,
men were no nearer the perception of why it happened so, or why it
happened at all. Tennyson saw clearly the wonders of astronomy and
geology, and discerned that the laws of nature were nothing more
than the habits, so to speak, of a power that was incredibly dim
and vast, a power which held within itself the secrets of motion
and rest, of death and life. Thus he claimed for his disciples not