nour to Tennyson, for it is a dishonour to our education, to
disparage a poet who wrote but the two--had he written no more of their
kind--lines of "The Passing of Arthur," of which, before I quote them, I
will permit myself the personal remembrance of a great contemporary
author's opinion. Mr. Meredith, speaking to me of the high-water mark of
English style in poetry and prose, cited those lines as topmost in
poetry:-

On one side lay the ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

Here is no taint of manner, no pretty posture or habit, but the
simplicity of poetry and the simplicity of Nature, something on the
yonder side of imagery. It is to be noted that this noble passage is
from Tennyson's generally weakest kind of work--blank verse; and should
thus be a sign that the laxity of so many parts of the "Idylls" and other
blank verse poems was a quite unnecessary fault. Lax this form of poetry
undoubtedly is with Tennyson. His blank verse is often too easy; it
cannot be said to fly, for the paradoxical reason that it has no weight;
it slips by, without halting or tripping indeed, but also without the
friction of the movement of vitality. This quality, which is so near to
a fault, this quality of ease, has come to be disregarded in our day.
That Horace Walpole overpraised this virtue is not good reason that we
should hold it for a vice. Yet we do more than undervalue it; and
several of our authors, in prose and poetry, seem to find much merit in
the manifest difficulty; they will not have a key to turn, though closely
and tightly, in oiled wards; let the reluctant iron catch and grind, or
they would even prefer to pick you the lock.

But though we may think it time that the quality once over-prized should
be restored to a more proportionate honour, our great poet Tennyson shows
us that of all merits ease is, unexpectedly enough, the most dangerous.
It is not only, with him, that the wards are oiled, it is also that the
key turns loosely. This is true of much of the beautiful "Idylls," but
not of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic verse as that
of the close of "A Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to the question
of ease, we cannot have a better maxim than Coventry Patmore's saying
that poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its difficulties." And
we could hardly find a more curious example of the present love of verse
that not only confesses but brags of diffic