By taking true for false, or false for true;
Here, thro’ the feeble twilight of this world
Groping, how many, until we pass and reach
That other, where we see as we are seen....
This practice has always been and will always remain a prerogative of poetry and it is not purism but frivolity of intellect that objects to it.
The actual poetic achievement of the Idylls is very great. That as a group they have no architectural unity is true, but they have never professed such unity. As separate stories they are graphically, and often very poignantly told, with innumerable touches of great felicity. They are pervaded by Tennyson’s descriptive gift and yet it is always closely woven into the imaginative texture and hardly ever indulged (as it was often by even so great a poet as Swinburne, for example) for its own sake. When Geraint comes to the town of the sparrow-hawk where
In a long valley, on one side of which,
White from the mason’s hand, a fortress rose;
And on one side a castle in decay,
Beyond a bridge that spann’d a dry ravine: