which stands out by itself, as it would do in any context, by sheer imaginative power. But the poem for the rest is a normal illustration of Tennyson’s method. The verbal opulence is peculiarly his own. It is not like that of Keats, such as he uses in many passages of The Eve of St. Agnes, where the inspiration is an almost swooning delight in tropical colours and spiced odours and textures very mellow to the touch. Keats aimed at and succeeded marvellously in finding in words some equivalence for these sensations, but with Tennyson the artistic intention was to arrest some almost impalpable property in the words themselves. When we charge a poet with merely using words we can only mean that he is using impoverished words. To complain that Tennyson overestimated the power of words to give up some remote, and as it were almost independent, life of their own to the poet’s incantation, is to complain that he presumed to look upon language as in itself a source of poetic life, which was no very wild thing for a poet to do, since life, like God, does move in a mysterious way. “Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,” “Now slides the silent meteor on,” “Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of the lake”—these words are revealing something at Tennyson’s touch that they had kept to themselves before. What precisely it is we cannot say, because it exists only in terms of Tennyson’s divine manipulation. We can talk, rationally enough, about vowels and consonants, but we are still compelled to leave something unsaid. But we miss much of the essential Tennyson if we do not recognise that in his orchestration of language he was, in a sense almost peculiar to himself among poets, creating life. “The chestnut pattering to the ground,” already quoted, may be given as another case in point. “Pattering” is here something more than the best word in the usual sense. It is true that it is more precise than “falling,” or “dropping,” but when that margin of superiority is allowed for there is still something over. And that something is not a lucky but inessential grace; it is life, and life of Tennyson’s especial engendering.
This was, I think, Tennyson’s particular enrichment of the tradition that he took up. A few other poets, Rossetti, for example, and others less celebrated, such as de Tabley, caught something of the way of it, but on the whole it was a very personal thing, perfected by its originator,[4] and not having any lasting influence. With Tennyson came and went the vital undertone of such lines as—
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
The murmuring of innumerable bees.
If it was heard again it could be as an echo only.
Chapter V
Browning’s Diction
O lyric love, half-angel and half-bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire,—
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,