Of him that utter'd nothing base,

and he was a loyal disciple of that poet whose aim had been, in his own
words, "to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making
the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to
see, to think, to feel, and therefore to become more actively and
securely virtuous". [1] Wordsworth had said that he wished to be
regarded as a teacher or as nothing, but unhappily he did not always
distinguish between the way in which a poet and a philosopher should
teach. He forgot that the didactic element in a poem should be, to
employ a homely illustration, what garlic should be in a salad, "scarce
suspected, animate the whole," that the poet teaches not as the moralist
and the preacher teach, but as nature and life teach us. He taught us
when he wrote 'The Fountain' and 'The Highland Reaper, The
Leach-gatherer' and 'Michael', he merely wearied us when he sermonised
in 'The Excursion' and in 'The Prelude'. Tennyson never makes this
mistake. He is seldom directly didactic. Would he inculcate subjugation
to the law of duty--he gives us the funeral ode on Wellington, 'The
Charge of the Light Brigade', and 'Love and Duty'. Would he inculcate
resignation to the will of God, and the moral efficacy of conventional
Christianity--he gives us 'Enoch Arden'. Would he picture the endless
struggle between the sensual and the spiritual, and the relation of
ideals to life--he gives us the 'Idylls of the King'. Would he point to
what atheism may lead--he gives us 'Lucretius'. Poems which are
masterpieces of sensuous art, such as mere aesthetes, like Rosetti and
his school, must contemplate with admiring despair, he makes vehicles of
the most serious moral and spiritual teaching. 'The Vision of Sin' is
worth a hundred sermons on the disastrous effects of unbridled
profligacy. In 'The Palace of Art' we have the quintessence of 'The Book
of Ecclesiastes' and much more besides. Even in 'The Lotos Eaters' we