oil in ocean-smelling
osier,' of the 'portal-warding lion-whelp, and peacock yew-tree',
every one knows that in himself Enoch could not have been charming.
People who sell fish about the country (and that is what he did,
though Mr. Tennyson won't speak out, and wraps it up) never are
beautiful. As Enoch was and must be coarse, in itself the poem must
depend for its charm on a 'gay confusion'--on a splendid accumulation
of impossible accessories.

Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us--he knows the country
world; he has proved it that no one living knows it better; he has
painted with pure art--with art which describes what is a race perhaps
more refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor--the
'Northern Farmer', and we all know what a splendid, what a living
thing, he has made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us
the ideal sailor in like manner--the ideal of the natural sailor we
mean--the characteristic present man as he lives and is. But this he
has not chosen. He has endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor,
at an exceptionally refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of
relinquishment. And with this task before him, his profound taste
taught him that ornate art was a necessary medium--was the sole
effectual instrument--for his purpose. It was necessary for him if
possible to abstract the mind from reality, to induce us _not_ to
conceive or think of sailors as they are while we are reading of his
sailors, but to think of what a person who did not know might fancy
sailors to be. A casual traveller on the sea-shore, with the sensitive
mood and the romantic imagination Mr. Newman has described, might
fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to be like that. Accordingly,
Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off the stress of fancy from
real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it with pretty accessories;
to engage it on the 'peacock yew-tree', and the 'portal-warding
lion-whelp'. Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the description
of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor would not
have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature would not
have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet
shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in
_Robinson Crusoe_, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments
would have been the principal subject to him. 'For three years', he
might have said, 'my back was