In any case we have a cheerful hope that, if he continues to advance upon himself as he has advanced heretofore, nay, if he can keep the level he has gained, such a work will be the greatest, and by far the greatest poetical creation, that, whether in our own or in foreign poetry, the nineteenth century has produced.  In the face of all critics, the Laureate of England has now reached a position which at once imposes and instils respect.  They are self-constituted; but he has won his way through the long dedication of his manful energies, accepted and crowned by deliberate, and, we rejoice to think, by continually growing, public favour.  He has after all, and it is not the least nor lowest item in his praise, been the severest of his own critics, and has not been too proud either to learn or to unlearn in the work of maturing his genius and building up his fame.

From his very first appearance he has had the form and fashion of a true poet:  the insight into beauty, the perception of harmony, the faculty of suggestion, the eye both in the physical and moral world for motion, light, and colour, the sympathetic and close observation of nature, the dominance of the constructive faculty, and that rare gift the thorough mastery and loving use of his native tongue.  Many of us, the common crowd, made of the common clay, may be lovers of Nature, some as sincere or even as ardent as Mr. Tennyson; but it does not follow that even these favoured few possess the privilege that he enjoys.  To them she speaks through vague and indeterminate impressions:  for him she has a voice of the most delicate articulation; all her images to him are clear and definite, and he translates them for us into that language of suggestion, emphasis, and refined analogy which links the manifold to the simple and the infinite to the finite.  He accomplishes for us what we should in vain attempt for ourselves, enables the puny hand to lay hold on what is vast, and brings even coarseness of grasp into a real contact with what is subtle and ethereal.  His turn for metaphysical analysis is closely associated with a deep ethical insight:  and many of his verses form sayings of so high a class that we trust they are destined to form a permanent part of the household-words of England.

Considering the quantity of power that Mr. Tennyson can make available, it is a great proof of self-discipline that he is not given to a wanton or tyrannous use of it.  An extraordinary master of diction, he has confined himself to its severe and simple forms.  In establishing this rule of practice his natural gift has evidently been aided by the fine English of the old romances, and we might count upon the fingers the cases in which he has lately deviated into the employment of any stilted phrase, or given sanction to a word not of the best fabric.  Profuse in the power of graphic[1] representation, he has chastened some of his earlier groups of imagery, which were occasionally overloaded with particulars; and in his