In 1842 his purging process made it evident that he did not mean to allow his faults or weaknesses to stint the growth and mar the exhibition of his genius.  When he published “In Memoriam” in 1850, all readers were conscious of the progressive widening and strengthening, but, above all, deepening of his mind.  We cannot hesitate to mark the present volume as exhibiting another forward and upward stride, and that by perhaps the greatest of all, in his career.  If we are required to show cause for this opinion under any special head, we would at once point to that which is, after all, the first among the poet’s gifts—­the gift of conceiving and representing human character.

Mr. Tennyson’s Arthurian essays continually suggest to us comparisons not so much with any one poet as a whole, but rather with many or most of the highest poets.  The music and the just and pure modulation of his verse carry us back not only to the fine ear of Shelley, but to Milton and to Shakespeare:  and his powers of fancy and of expression have produced passages which, if they are excelled by that one transcendent and ethereal poet of our nation whom we have last named, yet could have been produced by no other English minstrel.  Our author has a right to regard his own blank verse as highly characteristic and original:  but yet Milton has contributed to its formation, and occasionally there is a striking resemblance in turn and diction, while Mr. Tennyson is the more idiomatic of the two.  The chastity and moral elevation of this volume, its essential and profound though not didactic Christianity, are such as perhaps cannot be matched throughout the circle of English literature in conjunction with an equal power:  and such as to recall a pattern which we know not whether Mr. Tennyson has studied, the celestial strain of Dante.[1] This is the more remarkable, because he has had to tread upon the ground which must have been slippery for any foot but his.  We are far from knowing that either Lancelot or Guinevere would have been safe even for mature readers, were it not for the instinctive purity of his mind and the high skill of his management.  We do not know that in other times they have had their noble victims, whose names have become immortal as their own.

  Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto
  Di Lancilotto, e come amor lo strinse.
       * * * * *
  Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse.[2]

[1] It is no reproach to say that neither Dante nor Homer could have
    been studied by Mr. Tennyson at the time—­a very early period of his
    life—­when he wrote the lines which are allotted to them
    respectively in “The Palace of Art.”
[2] “Inferno,” c.  V, v. 127.

How difficult it is to sustain the elevation of such a subject, may be seen in the well-meant and long popular “Jane Shore” of Rowe.  How easily this very theme may be vulgarised, is shown in the "Chevaliers de la Table Ronde" of M. Creuze de Lesser, who nevertheless has aimed at a peculiar delicacy of treatment.