is contemporary, Browning. Comparison between the two
men seem inevitable; they were made by readers when _In Memoriam_ and
_Men and Women_ came hot from the press, and they have been made ever
since. There could, of course, scarcely be two men more dissimilar,
Tennyson elaborating and decorating the obvious; Browning delving into
the esoteric and the obscure, and bringing up strange and unfamiliar
finds; Tennyson in faultless verse registering current newly accepted
ways of thought; Browning in advance thinking afresh for himself,
occupied ceaselessly in the arduous labour of creating an audience fit
to judge him. The age justified the accuracy with which Tennyson
mirrored it, by accepting him and rejecting Browning. It is this very
accuracy that almost forces us at this time to minimise and dispraise
Tennyson's work. We have passed from Victorian certainties, and so he is
apt when he writes in the mood of _Locksley Hall_ and the rest, to
appear to us a little shallow, a little empty, and a little pretentious.

His earlier poetry, before he took upon himself the burden of the age,
is his best work, and it bears strongly marked upon it the influence of
Keats. Such a poem for instance as _Oenone_ shows an extraordinarily
fine sense of language and melody, and the capacity caught from Keats of
conveying a rich and highly coloured pictorial effect. No other poet,
save Keats, has had a sense of colour so highly developed as Tennyson's.
From his boyhood he was an exceedingly close and sympathetic observer of
the outward forms of nature, and he makes a splendid use of what his
eyes had taught him in these earlier poems. Later his interest in
insects and birds and flowers outran the legitimate opportunity he
possessed of using it in poetry. It was his habit, his son tells us, to
keep notebooks of things he had observed in his garden or in his walks,
and to work them up afterwards into similes for the _Princess_ and the
_Idylls of the King_. Read in the books written by admirers, in which
they have been studied and collected (there are several of them) these
similes are pleasing enough; in the text where they stand they are apt
to have the air of impertinences, beautiful and extravagant
impertinences no doubt, but alien to their setting. In one of the
_Idylls of the King_ the fall of a drunken knight from his horse is
compared to the fall of a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like
fir-tree, which Tennyson had observed n