The Flight of the Duchess.  Each contains at once a dramatization of human relations, and the statement of a creed.  The human beings in Browning’s poem, however, are not mere shadows out of old magazines; they are as real as the men and women in the portraits of the masters, as real as ourselves.  Similarly, in expressing his thought, Browning gives it imaginative dignity as philosophy, while Tennyson writes what is after all merely an exalted leading article.  There is more in common between Tennyson and Lytton than is generally realized.  Both were fond of windy words.  They were slaves of language to almost as great an extent as Swinburne.  One feels that too often phrases like “moor and fell” and “bower and hall” were mere sounding substitutes for a creative imagination.  I have heard it argued that the lines in Maud: 

  All night have the roses heard
  The flute, violin, bassoon;

introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ball-room orchestra merely for the sake of euphony.  The mistake about the bassoon is a small one, and is, I suppose, borrowed from Coleridge, but it is characteristic.

Tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he was generally accepted as being.  He was an artist of lines rather than of poems.  He seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring full-armed from the imagination as the great poems of the world do.  He built them up haphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels.  They are full of sententious padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher’s vacuous babbling in his sleep, as so much of Wordsworth is; it is the word-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, or things.  Let us admit at once that when Tennyson is word perfect he takes his place among the immortals.  One may be convinced that the bulk of his work is already as dead as the bulk of Longfellow’s work.  But in his great poems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect form, and expressed it perfectly.  He did this in Ulysses, which comes nearer a noble perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote.  One can imagine the enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson is as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines hackneyed for us by much quotation: 

  The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: 
  The long day wanes:  the slow moon climbs:  the deep
  Moans round with many voices.  Come, my friends,
  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
  Push off, and sitting well in order smite
  The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
  To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
  Of all the western stars, until I die. 
  It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

There, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makes Browning’s people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy illustrating an old story.  One of the most beautiful lines Tennyson ever wrote: