oetry in a few
early years; Milton lost his pure lyric gift. But the most salient
instance of all is Tennyson; in the two earliest volumes there is a
perfectly novel charm, a grace, a daring which he lost in later life.
He became solemn, mannerised, conscious of responsibility. Sometimes,
as in some of the lyrics of _Maud_, he had a flash of the old spirit.
But compare the _Idylls of the King_, for all their dignity and lavish
art, their sweet cadences, their mellifluous flow, with the early
fragment in the same manner, the _Morte d'Arthur_, and you become aware
that some exquisite haunted quality has slipped away from the later
work which made the _Morte d'Arthur_ one of the most perfect poems of
the century. The _Morte d'Arthur_ is seen, the _Idylls_ are laboriously
imagined. The _Idylls_, again, are full of an everyday morality--the
praise of civic virtues, the evolution of types--and how tiresome they
thus become! but in the _Morte d'Arthur_ there is only a prophetic
mysticism, which is all the more noble because it is so remote from
common things.

With Browning it is the same in a certain degree; there is a charm
about _Pauline_, for all its immaturity, which creates an
irrepressible, uncalculating mood of undefined longing, utterly absent
from his latest work. Perhaps one of the most remarkable instances is
that of Rossetti. In the course of the _House of Life_, the dark
curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its
fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet
of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary,
voluptuous soul, in its restless passage among perfumed chambers,
looked out suddenly from a window upon some forest glade, full of cool
winds and winter sunshine, and stood silent awhile. These sonnets will
always be found to be the earlier writings transplanted into the new
setting.

I suppose it is to a certain extent a physical thing. It is the shadow
of experience, of familiarity, of weariness that creeps over the soul.
In youth the spirit expands like an opening rose, and things heard and
seen strike upon the senses with an incredible novelty and freshness,
hinting at all sorts of sweet surprises, joyful secrets, hopeful
mysteries. It is the subtle charm of youth that evaporates, the charm
that makes a young and eager boy on the threshold of manhood so
interesting, so delightful, even though he may be inarticulate and
immature and self