then with the 1842 book came practically the completion of Tennyson
in the sense of the indication of his powers. Edward FitzGerald, as is
elsewhere noticed, thought, or at least said, that everything his friend
had done after this was more or less a declension. This is a common and
not an ignoble Fallacy of Companionship--the delusion of those who have
hailed and accompanied a poet or a prophet in his early struggles. It
is not even wholly a fallacy, inasmuch as, in the case of the class of
poets to which Tennyson belongs, there does come a time when the rest of
the products of their genius is so to speak _applied_: it ceases to
reveal them in new aspects. They do not repeat themselves; but they
chiefly vary. Now came the magnificent "Morte D'Arthur" (the "Idylls of
the King" in microcosm, with all their merits and none of their
defects), "St. Simeon Stylites," "Ulysses," "Locksley Hall," "St. Agnes'
Eve," and other exquisite things; while to this period, as the
subsequent arrangement shows, belong not a few, such as "Tithonus" and
"The Voyage," which were not actually published till later, and in which
keen observers at the time of their publication detected as it were an
older ring, a more genuine and unblended vintage.

It is not improper therefore to break off here for a moment and to
endeavour to state--leaving out the graces that can never be stated, and
are more important than all the others--the points in which this new
excellence of Tennyson differed from the excellences of his forerunners.
One of them, not the least important, but the least truly original,
because something distantly resembling it had been seen before in Keats
and Shelley, is the combined application of pictorial and musical
handling. Not, of course, that all poets had not endeavoured to depict
their subjects vividly and to arrange the picture in a melodious frame
of sound, not that the best of them had not also endeavoured to convey,
if it were possible, the colours into the sense, the sense into the
music. But partly as a result of the natural development and acquired
practice of the language, partly for the very reason that the arts both
of painting and music had themselves made independent progress, most of
all, perhaps, because Tennyson was the first poet in English of the very
greatest genius who dared not to attempt work on the great scale, but
put into short pieces (admitting, of course, of infinite formal variety)
what most of his fo