of cleverness; the rhymes are
merely inevitable--there is no visible transformation of metaphor in
deference to their suggestions; nothing is antic, peculiar, superfluous;
but here in epic unity and completeness, here is a sublimation of
experience expressed by means of a sublimation of style. It is unique in
English, and for all that one can see it is like to remain unique this
good while yet. The impression you take is one of singular loftiness of
purpose and a rare nobility of mind. Looking upon life and time and the
spirit of man from the heights of his eighty years, it has been given to
the Master Poet to behold much that is hid to them in the plain or on the
slopes beneath him, and beholding it to frame and utter a message so
lofty in style and in significance so potent that it sounds as of this
world indeed but from the confines of experience, the farthest kingdoms
of mortality.

His Mastership.

It is to note, too, that the Laureate of to-day deals with language in a
way that to the Tennyson of the beginning was--unhappily--impossible. In
those early years he neither would nor could have been responsible for
the magnificent and convincing rhythms of _Vastness_, the austere yet
passionate shapeliness of _Happy_, the effects of vigour and variety
realised in _Parnassus_. For in those early years he was rather
Benvenuto than Michelangelo, he was more of a jeweller than a sculptor,
the phrase was too much to him, the inspiration of the incorrect too
little. All that is changed, and for the best. Most interesting is it
to the artist to remark how impatient--(as the Milton of the _Agonistes_
was)--of rhyme and how confident in rhythm is the whilome poet of
_Oriana_ and _The Lotus-Eaters_ and _The Vision of Sin_; and how this
impatience and this confidence are revealed not merely in a piece of
mysticism naked yet unashamed as _The Gleam_--(whose movement with its
constancy in double endings and avoidance of triplets is perhaps a little
tame)--but also in what should have been a popular piece: the ode, to
wit, _On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria_. In eld, indeed, the craftsman
inclines to play with his material: he is conscious of mastery; he is in
the full enjoyment of his own; he indulges in experiments which to him
are as a crown of glory and to them that come after him--to the noodles
that would walk in his ways without first preparing themselves by prayer
and study and a life of abnegation--are only th