In this latest poem we find also the old surpassing skill of language, a skill dependent on the faculty of penetrating to the inmost significance both of words and of things, so that there is no waste, and so that single words in single sentences stamp on the brain the substance of long experiences.  Witness this:  Enoch lies sick, distant from home and wife and children; here is one word crowded with pathos, telling of the weary loss of livelihood, the burden slowly growing more intolerably irksome to the bold and careful worker wrestling with pain, and to the fragile mother of the new-born babe:—­

    “Another hand crept, too, across his trade,
    Taking her bread and theirs.”

See, again, how one line woven in the context shows where the tears came.  Enoch, wrecked, solitary, almost hopeless, found that

    “A phantom made of many phantoms moved
    Before him, haunting him,—­or he himself
    Moved, haunting people, things, and places known
    Far in a darker isle beyond the line: 
    The babes, their babble, Annie, the small house,
    The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes,
    The peacock-yewtree and the lonely Hall,
    The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill
    November dawns and dewy glooming of the downs,
    The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves,
    And the low moan of leaden-colored seas.”

We know of no more perfect rendering of an unlearned and trustful faith in God than this which Tennyson puts in the mouth of Enoch as he departs on the voyage from which he never returns to his wife:—­

      “If you fear,
    Cast all your fears on God:  that anchor holds. 
    Is He not yonder in those uttermost
    Parts of the morning? if I flee to these,
    Can I go from Him?  And the sea is His,
    The sea is His:  He made it.”

In the repetition in the last line one can almost hear the sob welling up from the heart of the strong sailor, as he speaks of God to one beloved, in time of trial,—­the feeling of bitterness in parting starting with the impulse of the stronger faith.

In “Enoch Arden,” as in “In Memoriam,” Tennyson shows the sweet and sure sympathy which informs him of all the ways of grief.  In its sacred experiences, where the slightest variance from the simplicity of actual feeling would jostle all, he holds his way unquestioned.

It is a test, unembarrassed and complete, of genius, this treatment of grief, the emotion which least of all brooks exaggeration or sentimentalism.  It is the test of human purity, too, and the hand must be very tender and very clean which leaves thus exact and clear the picture of the crowning phase of human life.  If “In Memoriam” has appropriated to itself, by its sublime supremacy, a phrase which, though in daily use, is never heard without suggesting the poem, Tennyson shows in “Enoch Arden” that he understands the sad and perfect reign of grief in the life of the sailor and of the sailor’s wife struck with a great sorrow for the loss of the latest born, as well as in the broad and varied range of his own cultured nature.