the quantity of power that Mr. Tennyson can make available,
it is a great proof of self-discipline that he is not given to a wanton
or tyrannous use of it. An extraordinary master of diction, he has
confined himself to its severe and simple forms. In establishing this
rule of practice his natural gift has evidently been aided by the fine
English of the old romances, and we might count upon the fingers the
cases in which he has lately deviated into the employment of any stilted
phrase, or given sanction to a word not of the best fabric. Profuse in
the power of graphic[1] representation, he has chastened some of his
earlier groups of imagery, which were occasionally overloaded with
particulars; and in his later works, as has been well remarked, he has
shown himself thoroughly aware that in poetry half is greater than the
whole. That the chastity of style he has attained is not from exhaustion
of power may easily be shown. No poet has evinced a more despotic
mastery over intractable materials, or has been more successful in
clothing what is common with the dignity of his art. The Downs are not
the best subjects in the world for verse; but they will be remembered
with and by his descriptive line in the "Idylls"--

Far o'er the long backs of the bushless downs.

[1] We use the word in what we conceive to be its only legitimate
meaning; namely, after the manner and with the effect of painting.
It signifies the _quid_, not the _quale_.

How becoming is the appearance of what we familiarly term the "clod" in
the "Princess"! (p. 37)--

Nor those horn-handled breakers of the glebe.

Of all imaginable subjects, mathematics might seem the most hopeless to
make mention of in verse; but they are with him

The hard-grained Muses of the cube and square.

Thus at a single stroke he gives an image alike simple, true, and
poetical to boot, because suited to its place and object in his verse,
like the heavy Caryatides well placed in architecture. After this, we
may less esteem the feat by which in "Godiva" he describes the clock
striking mid-day:--

All at once,
With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon
Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers.

But even the contents of a pigeon-pie are not beneath his notice, nor
yet beyond his powers of embellishment, in "Audley Court":--

A pasty, costly made,
Where quail and pigeon, lark and le