This deep simple faith in the divineness of Nature as she appears, which, in our eyes, is Mr. Tennyson’s differentia, is really the natural accompaniment of a quality at first sight its very opposite, and for which he is often blamed by a prosaic world; namely, his subjective and transcendental mysticism.  It is the mystic, after all, who will describe Nature most simply, because he sees most in her; because he is most ready to believe that she will reveal to others the same message which she has revealed to him.  Men like Behmen, Novalis, and Fourier, who can soar into the inner cloud-world of man’s spirit, even though they lose their way there, dazzled by excess of wonder—­men who, like Wordsworth, can give utterance to such subtle anthropologic wisdom as the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,” will for that very reason most humbly and patiently “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.”  And even so it is just because Mr. Tennyson is, far more than Wordsworth, mystical, and what an ignorant and money-getting generation, idolatrous of mere sensuous activity, calls “dreamy,” that he has become the greatest naturalistic poet which England has seen for several centuries.  The same faculty which enabled him to draw such subtle subjective pictures of womanhood as Adeline, Isabel, and Eleanor, enabled him to see, and therefore simply to describe, in one of the most distinctive and successful of his earlier poems, how

The creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
   And the willow branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
   And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.

No doubt there are in the earlier poems exceptions to this style—­ attempts to adorn nature, and dazzle with a barbaric splendour akin to that of Keats—­as, for instance, in the “Recollections of the Arabian Nights.”  But how cold and gaudy, in spite of individual beauties, is that poem by the side of either of the Marianas, and especially of the one in which the scenery is drawn, simply and faithfully, from those counties which the world considers the quintessence of the prosaic—­the English fens.

Upon the middle of the night
   Waking she heard the night-fowl crow;
The cock sang out an hour ere light: 
   From the dark fen the oxen’s low
Came to her:  without hope of change,
   In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn,
   Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.

* * * * *

About a stone-cast from the wall
   A sluice with blackened waters slept,
And o’er it many, round and small,
   The cluster’d marish-mosses crept. 
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
   All silver-green with gnarled bark,
   For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray,