for its exercise with equal impartiality whatever was most beautiful in the world of Grecian fable or the world of mediaeval legend.  But unlike Keats, he lived to add new strings to his lyre; he went on to sing of modern life and thought, of present-day problems in science and philosophy, of contemporary politics, the doubt, unrest, passion, and faith of his own century.  To find work of Tennyson’s that is romantic throughout, in subject, form, and spirit alike, we must look among his earlier collections (1830, 1832, 1842).  For this was a phase which he passed beyond, as Millais outgrew his youthful Pre-Raphaelitism, or as Goethe left behind him his “Goetz” and “Werther” period and widened out into larger utterance.  Mr. Stedman speaks of the “Gothic feeling” in “The Lady of Shalott,” and in ballads like “Oriana” and “The Sisters,” describing them as “work that in its kind is fully up to the best of those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrest of development, stop precisely where Tennyson made his second step forward, and censure him for having gone beyond them.” [25] This estimate may be accepted so far as it concerns “The Lady of Shalott,” which is known to have worked strongly upon Rossetti’s imagination; but surely “The Sisters” and “Oriana” do not rank with the best Pre-Raphaelite work.  The former is little better than a failure; and the latter, which provokes a comparison, not to Tennyson’s advantage, with the fine old ballad, “Helen of Kirkconnell,” is a weak thing.  The name Oriana has romantic associations—­it is that of the heroine of “Amadis de Gaul”—­but the damnable iteration of it as a ballad burden is irritating.  Mediaeval motifs are rather slightly handled in “The Golden Supper” (from the “Decameron,” 4th novel, 10th day); “The Beggar Maid” (from the ballad of “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid” in the “Reliques"); and more adequately in “Godiva,” a blank-verse rendering of the local legend of Coventry, in which an attempt is made to preserve something of the antique roughness under the smooth Vergilian elegance of Tennyson’s diction.  “The Day Dream” was a recasting of one of Perrault’s fairy tales, “The Sleeping Beauty,” under which title a portion of it had appeared in the “Poems Chiefly Lyrical” of 1830.  Tennyson has written many greater poems than this, but few in which the special string of romance vibrates more purely.  The tableau of the spellbound palace, with all its activities suspended, gave opportunity for the display of his unexampled pictorial power in scenes of still life; and the legend itself supplied that charmed isolation from the sphere of reality which we noticed as so important a part of the romantic poet’s stock-in-trade in “Christabel” and “The Eve of St. Agnes”—­

  “The hall-door shuts again and all is still.”

Poems like “The Day Dream” and “The Princess” make it evident that Scott and Coleridge and Keats had so given back the Middle Ages to the imagination that any future poet, seeking free play in a realm unhampered by actual conditions—­“apart from place, withholding time”—­was apt to turn naturally, if not inevitably, to the feudal times.  The action of “The Day Dream” proceeds no-where and no-when.  The garden—­if we cross-examine it—­is a Renaissance garden: