From the dread sweep of the down-streaming seas."

"All-kindled by a still and sacred fire,
That burned as on an altar."

"With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd,
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers."

"Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life
Shoots to the fall."

"That sets at twilight in a land of reeds."

"And wearying in a land of sand and thorns."

"Pelleas and sweet smell of the fields
Past, and the sunshine came along with him."

"By a mossed brookbank on a stone
I smelt a wildweed flower alone;
There was a ringing in my ears,
And both my eyes gushed out with tears."

"Clash like the coming and retiring wave."

"Quiet as any water-sodden log
Stay'd in the wandering warble of a brook."

"The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh."

From these quotations, not exhaustive, but representative, one may see
in how gracious a sense Tennyson was a pastoral poet, in that he and
his thought haunted the brookside and the mountainside, the shadow and
the sunshine, the dark night, or dewy eve, or the glad dawn, always.
Therefore is Tennyson a rest to the spirit. He takes you from your
care, and ends by taking your care from you. He quiets your spirit. I
go to his poems as I would go to seashore or mountain; and a quiet
deep, as the gently falling night, wraps my spirit. Bless him always
for the rest he knows to give and cares to give!

Tennyson's genius is lyrical rather than either dramatic or epic. What
music is like his? Say of his poems, in words of James Whitcomb Riley,

"O but the sound was rainy sweet!"

Not great Milton was more master of music than he; though Milton's was
the melody of wide ocean in open sea, or crash of waves upon the rugged
rocks, or wrathing up the yellow sands in tumult of majestic menace.
Tennyson's music is rather the voice of gentle waters, or the cadence
of summer's winds in the tree-tops, or like human voices heard in some
woodland. In either poet is no marred music. Mrs. Browning fell out
of time; Tennyson never. His verse is like some loved voice which
makes perpetual music in our heart. Read all of his poetry, and how
diversified soever his meter is, music never fails; yet his lyrics are
not as those of Burns, whose words sing like the brook Tennyson has
sung of. B