by the great tenderness of his feeling.  Had Tennyson been primarily of a metaphysical or philosophical mind all this might have been different.  True, he was somewhat of a student of philosophy and religion, and some of his poems are of these subjects, but his thought even here is always simple and plain, and he never attempted the deep study that was not characteristic of his nature.  No less successful is he in avoiding obscurity in expression.  There are few passages that need much explanation.  In this he offers a striking contrast to Browning, who often painfully hid his meaning under complex phraseology.  His vocabulary is remarkably large, and when we study his use of words, we find that in many cases they are from the two-syllabled class.  This matter of choice of clear, simple words and phrases is very important.  For, just so much as our attention is drawn from what a poet says to the medium, the language in which he says it, so much is its clearness injured.  Vividly to see pictures in our imagination or to be affected by our emotions, we must not, as we read, experience any jar.  In Tennyson we never have to think of his expressions—­except to admire their simple beauty.  Simplicity and beauty, then, are two noticeable qualities of his poetry.”—­Charles Read Nutter.

“An idyllic or picturesque mode of conveying his sentiments is the one natural to Tennyson, if not the only one permitted by his limitations.  He is a born observer of physical nature, and, whenever he applies an adjective to some object or passingly alludes to some phenomenon which others have but noted, is almost infallibly correct.  He has the unerring first touch which in a single line proves the artist; and it justly has been remarked that there is more true English landscape in many an isolated stanza of In Memoriam than in the whole of The Seasons, that vaunted descriptive poem of a former century.”—­Edmund Clarence Stedman.

“In describing scenery, his microscopic eye and marvellously delicate ear are exercised to the utmost in detecting the minutest relations and most evanescent melodies of the objects before him, in order that his representation shall include everything which is important to their full perfection.  His pictures of rural English scenery give the inner spirit as well as the outward form of the objects, and represent them, also, in their relation to the mind which is gazing on them.  The picture in his mind is spread out before his detecting and dissecting intellect, to be transformed to words only when it can be done with the most refined exactness, both as regards color and form and melody.”—­E.P.  Whipple.

“For the most part he wrote of the every day loves and duties of men and women; of the primal pains and joys of humanity; of the aspirations and trials which are common to all ages and all classes and independent even of the diseases of civilization, but he made them new and surprising by the art which he added to them, by beauty of thought, tenderness of feeling, and exquisiteness of shaping.”—­Stopford A. Brooke.