rics as "The splendour falls" and "Tears,
idle tears," such blank verse as that of the closing passage, would
raise to the topmost heights of poetry whatever subject it was spent
upon.

_In Memoriam_ attacked two subjects in the main,--the one perennial, the
other of the time,--just as _The Princess_ had done. The perennial,
which is often but another, if not an exclusive, word for the poetical,
was in the first case aspirant and happy love, in the other mourning
friendship. The ephemeral was, in the latter, the sort of half doubting
religiosity which has occupied so much of the thought of our day. On
this latter point, as on the other just mentioned and on most beside,
the attitude of Tennyson was "Liberal-Conservatism" (if political slang
may be generalised), inclining always to the Conservative rather than to
the Liberal side, but giving Liberalism a sufficient footing and
hearing. Here again opinions may be divided; and here again those who
think that in poetry the mere fancies of the moment are nothing may be
disposed to pay little attention to the particular fancies which have
occupied the poet. But here again the manner, as always with real poets,
carries off, dissolves, annihilates the special matter for poetical
readers. Tennyson had here taken (not invented) a remarkable and not
frequently used stanza, the iambic dimeter quatrain with the rhymes not
alternated, but arranged _a b b a_. It is probable that if a
well-instructed critic had been asked beforehand what would be the
effect of this employed with a certain monotone of temper and subject in
a book of some three thousand lines or so, he would have shaken his head
and hinted that the substantive would probably justify its adjective
and the monotone become monotonous. And if he had been really a deacon
in his craft he would have added: "But to a poet there is nothing
impossible." The difficulty was no impossibility to Tennyson. He has not
only, in the rather more than six score poems of this wonderful book,
adjusted his medium to a wide range of subjects, all themselves adjusted
to the general theme, but he has achieved that poetic miracle, the
communication to the same metre and to no very different scheme of
phrase of an infinite variety of interior movement. There is scarcely a
bad line in _In Memoriam_; there are few lines that do not contain a
noble thought, a passionate sentiment, a beautiful picture; but there is
nothing greater about it than the way