Some poets, not weak in poetic imagination, yet use it chiefly for secondary purposes, that is, for beautifying the dress, the externals of poetry.  Minds with some breadth but with little depth are not thoroughly original.  Their sense of the beautiful busies itself necessarily with that for which they have the readiest gifts; and their readiest gifts being words more than ideas, versification more than thought, form more than substance, they turn out verse, chiefly narrative, which captivates through its easy flow, its smooth sensuousness of diction, its gloss.  Take a poet so celebrated, in some respects so admirable, as Tennyson.  Tennyson’s verse is apt to be too richly dressed, too perfumed.  The clothing is costlier than the thoughts can pay for.  Hence at every re-reading of him he parts with some of his strength, so that after three or four repetitions he has little left for you.  From a similar cause this is the case too with Byron, through whose pen to common sentiment and opinion a glow is imparted by the animal heat of the man, heightened by poetic tints from a keen sense of the beautiful.  But this is not the case with Keats or Shelley or Coleridge or Wordsworth, and of course therefore not with Milton or Shakespeare.  All these keep fresh, at every contact giving you strength and losing none.  As freely and freshly as the sun’s beams through a transparent, upspringing Gothic spire, intellect and feeling play, ever undimmed, through Shelley’s “Sky-Lark.”  Not so through Tennyson’s “Dream of Fair Women.”  After a time these mellifluous stanzas droop, and cling to the paper:  they have not enough flame-like motion.  The nicest word-choosing will not supply the place of choice in thought, a choice prompted by fresh feeling; nor, where there is no new impulse from the heart, will the most gorgeous diction give to a line the poetic carnation.  There can be no freshness of expression without freshness of thought; the sparkle on the skin comes from new blood in the heart.

Tennyson’s poetry has often too much leaf and spray for the branches, and too much branch for the trunk, and too much trunk for the roots.  There is not living stock enough of thought deeply set in emotion to keep the leaves ever fresh and fragrant.  Wordsworth’s poetry has for the most part roots deeply hidden.

Poetry is at times fitted to a subject too much like clothes to a body.  This is the method with even some writers of good gifts and deserved name.  Compared with Goethe, who, sensuous as he is, but healthily sensuous, writes always from within outward, Schiller is chargeable with this kind of externality.  To try to make the fancy do the work of feeling is a vain effort.  And so much verse is of the memory and fancy more than of the heart and imagination.  Inward impulse not being dominant, the words, however shiny, are touched with coldness.  Under the inward dominance (supposing always that the intellectual tool be of due temper and sharpness) the poet mounts