studied and collected (there are several of them) these similes are pleasing enough; in the text where they stand they are apt to have the air of impertinences, beautiful and extravagant impertinences no doubt, but alien to their setting.  In one of the Idylls of the King the fall of a drunken knight from his horse is compared to the fall of a jutting edge of cliff and with it a lance-like fir-tree, which Tennyson had observed near his home, and one cannot resist the feeling that the comparison is a thought too great for the thing it was meant to illustrate.  So, too, in the Princess when he describes a handwriting,

“In such a hand as when a field of corn
 Bows all its ears before the roaring East.”

he is using up a sight noted in his walks and transmuted into poetry on a trivial and frivolous occasion.  You do not feel, in fact, that the handwriting visualized spontaneously called up the comparison; you are as good as certain that the simile existed waiting for use before the handwriting was thought of.

The accuracy of his observation of nature, his love of birds and larvae is matched by the carefulness with which he embodies, as soon as ever they were made, the discoveries of natural and physical science.  Nowadays, possibly because these things have become commonplace to us, we may find him a little school-boy-like in his pride of knowledge.  He knows that

“This world was once a fluid haze of light,
 Till toward the centre set the starry tides
 And eddied wild suns that wheeling cast
 The planets.”

just as he knows what the catkins on the willows are like, or the names of the butterflies:  but he is capable, on occasion of “dragging it in,” as in

“The nebulous star we call the sun,
 If that hypothesis of theirs be sound.”

from the mere pride in his familiarity with the last new thing.  His dealings with science, that is, no more than his dealings with nature, have that inevitableness, that spontaneous appropriateness that we feel we have a right to ask from great poetry.

Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for his theory of the impossibility of writing, in modern times, a long poem, he might have found it in Tennyson.  His strength is in his shorter pieces; even where as in In Memoriam he has conceived and written something at once extended and beautiful, the beauty lies rather in the separate parts; the thing is more in the nature of a sonnet sequence than a continuous poem.  Of his other larger works, the Princess, a scarcely happy blend between burlesque in the manner of the Rape of the Lock, and a serious apostleship of the liberation of women, is solely redeemed by these lyrics.  Tennyson’s innate conservatism hardly squared with the liberalising tendencies he caught from the more advanced thought of his age, in writing it.  Something of the same kind is true of Maud, which is a novel told in dramatically varied verse.