him in
special instances; but he is the only one who rarely nods, and who always
finishes his verse to the extreme. Here is the absolute sway of metre,
compelling every rhyme and measure needful to the thought; here are
sinuous alliterations, unique and varying breaks and pauses, winged
flights and falls, the glory of sound and color everywhere present, or,
if missing, absent of the poet's free will. The fullness of his art
evades the charm of spontaneity. His original and fastidious art is of
itself a theme for an essay. The poet who studies it may well despair,
he can never excel it; its strength is that of perfection; its weakness,
the ever-perfection which marks a still-life painter."--_Edmund Clarence
Stedman_.

"A striking quality of Tennyson's poetry is its simplicity, both in
thought and expression. This trait was characteristic of his life, and
so we naturally expect to find it in his verse. Tennyson was too sincere
by nature, and too strongly averse to experimenting in new fields of
poetry, to attempt the affected or unique. He purposely avoided all
subjects which he feared he could not treat with simplicity and
clearness. So, in his shorter poems, there are few obscure or ambiguous
passages, little that is not easy of comprehension. His subjects
themselves tend to prevent ambiguity or obscurity. For he wrote of men
and women as he saw them about him, of their joys and sorrows, their
trials, their ideals,--and in this was nothing complex. Thus there is a
homely quality to his poems, but they are kept from the commonplace by
the great tenderness of his feeling. Had Tennyson been primarily of a
metaphysical or philosophical mind all this might have been different.
True, he was somewhat of a student of philosophy and religion, and some
of his poems are of these subjects, but his thought even here is always
simple and plain, and he never attempted the deep study that was not
characteristic of his nature. No less successful is he in avoiding
obscurity in expression. There are few passages that need much
explanation. In this he offers a striking contrast to Browning, who
often painfully hid his meaning under complex phraseology. His
vocabulary is remarkably large, and when we study his use of words, we
find that in many cases they are from the two-syllabled class. This
matter of choice of clear, simple words and phrases is very important.
For, just so much as our attention is drawn from what a poet