Sir Walter Scott’s ballads fail just on the same point.  Even Campbell cannot avoid an occasional false note of sentiment.  In Mr. Tennyson alone, as we think, the spirit of the Middle Age is perfectly reflected; its delight, not in the “sublime and picturesque,” but in the green leaves and spring flowers for their own sake—­the spirit of Chaucer and of the “Robin Hood Garland”—­the naturalism which revels as much in the hedgerow and garden as in Alps, and cataracts, and Italian skies, and the other strong stimulants to the faculty of admiration which the palled taste of an unhealthy age, from Keats and Byron down to Browning, has rushed abroad to seek.  It is enough for Mr. Tennyson’s truly English spirit to see how

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the field the road runs by
      To many-tower’d Camelot.

Or how

In the stormy east wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
      Over tower’d Camelot.

Give him but such scenery as that which he can see in every parish in England, and he will find it a fit scene for an ideal myth, subtler than a casuist’s questionings, deep as the deepest heart of woman.

But in this earlier volume the poet has not yet arrived at the art of combining his new speculations on man with his new mode of viewing Nature.  His objective pieces are too exclusively objective, his subjective too exclusively subjective; and where he deals with natural imagery in these latter, he is too apt, as in “Eleanore,” to fall back upon the old and received method of poetic diction, though he never indulges in a commonplace or a stock epithet.  But in the interval between 1830 and 1842 the needful interfusion of the two elements has taken place.  And in “Locksley Hall” and the “’Two Voices” we find the new doubts and questions of the time embodied naturally and organically, in his own method of simple natural expression.  For instance, from the Search for Truth in the “Two Voices”—­

Cry, faint not, climb:  the summits lope
Beyond the furthest flights of hope,
Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope.

Sometimes a little corner shines
As over rainy mist inclines
A gleaming crag with belts of pines.

“I will go forward,” sayest thou;
“I shall not fail to find her now. 
Look up, the fold is on her brow.”

Or again, in “Locksley Hall,” the poem which, as we think deservedly, has had most influence on the minds of the young men of our day: 

Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father’s field, And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn, Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn; And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then, Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men; Men, my brothers, men the workers, over reaping something new:  That which they have done but earnest of the things which they shall do: