in which, side by side with the
prevailing undertone of the stanza, the individual pieces vary the music
and accompany it, so to speak, in duet with a particular melody. It must
have been already obvious to good ears that no greater master of English
harmonics--perhaps that none so great--had ever lived; but _In Memoriam_
set the fact finally and irrevocably on record.

_Maud_ was the third, and perhaps it may be said to have been, on a
great scale, the last experiment in thus combining the temporal with the
eternal. It was also probably the weakest as a whole, though the poet
had never done more poetical things than the passage beginning, "Cold
and clear-cut face"; than the prothalamium, never to have its due
sequel, "I have led her home"; than the incomparable and
never-to-be-hackneyed "Come into the garden"; or than the best of all,
"Oh! that 'twere possible." It may even be contended that if it were
ever allowable to put the finger down and say, "Here is the highest,"
these, and not the best things of the 1842 volumes, are the absolute
summit of the poet's effort, the point which, though he was often near
it, he never again quite reached. But the piece, as a whole, is
certainly less of a success, less smooth and finished as it comes from
its own lathe, than either _The Princess_ or _In Memoriam_. It looks too
like an essay in competition with the "Spasmodic School" of its own day;
it drags in merely casual things--adulteration, popular politics, and
ephemera of all kinds--too assiduously, and its characterisations are
not happy. There is a tradition that the poet met a critic, and a very
accomplished critic too, who was one of his own oldest friends, and
said, "What do you mean by calling _Maud_ vulgar?" "I didn't," said the
critic, quite truly. "No, but you meant it," growled Tennyson. And there
was something of a confession in the growl.

But these slight relapses (and, after all, what sort of a relapse is it
which gives us not merely the incomparable things referred to, but
others hardly less exquisite?) never, in the great writers, serve as
anything but retreats before an advance; and certainly, in a sense, the
_Idylls of the King_ were an advance, though not, perhaps, in all
senses. No total so brilliant, so varied within a certain general unity,
so perfectly polished in style, so cunningly adjusted to meet the
popular without disappointing the critical ear, had ever come from
Tennyson's pen as the first quar