made a sympathetic figure, which, in the
skilful hands of Henry Irving, won considerable favour upon the stage.
But the times were out of joint for the poetic drama, and he had not the
rich imagination of Shakespeare, nor the power to create living men and
women who compel our hearts to pity, to horror, or to delight. For the
absence of this no studious reading of history, no fine sentiment, no
noble cadences, can make amends, and it seems doubtful whether future
ages will regard the plays as anything but a literary curiosity.

On the other hand, nothing which he wrote has touched the human heart
more genuinely than the poems of peasant life, some of them written in
the broadest Lincolnshire dialect, which Tennyson produced during the
years in which he was engaged on the Idylls and the plays. 'The
Grandmother', 'The Northern Cobbler', and the two poems on the
Lincolnshire farmers of following generations, were as popular as
anything which the Victorian Age produced, and seem likely to keep their
pre-eminence. The two latter illustrate, by their origin, Tennyson's
power of seizing on a single impression, and building on it a work of
creative genius. It was enough for him to hear the anecdote of the dying
farmer's words, 'God A'mighty little knows what he's about in taking me!
And Squire will be mad'; and he conceived the character of the man, and
his absorption in the farm where he had lived and worked and around
which he grouped his conceptions of religion and duty. The later type of
farmer was evoked similarly by a quotation in the dialect of his county:
'When I canters my herse along the ramper, I 'ears "proputty, proputty,
proputty"'; and again Tennyson achieved a triumph of characterization.
It is here perhaps that he comes nearest to the achievements of his
great rival Browning in the field of dramatic lyrics.

Apart from the writing and publication of his poems, we cannot divide
Tennyson's later life into definite sections. By 1850 his habits had
been formed, his friendships established, his fame assured; such
landmarks as are furnished by the birth of his children, by his
journeyings abroad, by the homes in which he settled, point to no
essential change in the current of his life. Of the perfect happiness
which marriage brought to him, of the charm and dignity which enabled
Mrs. Tennyson to hold her place worthily at his side, many witnesses
have spoken. Two sons were born to him, one of whom died in 1886, while