And then with the 1842 book came practically the completion of Tennyson in the sense of the indication of his powers. Edward FitzGerald, as is elsewhere noticed, thought, or at least said, that everything his friend had done after this was more or less a declension. This is a common and not an ignoble Fallacy of Companionship--the delusion of those who have hailed and accompanied a poet or a prophet in his early struggles. It is not even wholly a fallacy, inasmuch as, in the case of the class of poets to which Tennyson belongs, there does come a time when the rest of the products of their genius is so to speak _applied_: it ceases to reveal them in new aspects. They do not repeat themselves; but they chiefly vary. Now came the magnificent "Morte D'Arthur" (the "Idylls of the King" in microcosm, with all their merits and none of their defects), "St. Simeon Stylites," "Ulysses," "Locksley Hall," "St. Agnes' Eve," and other exquisite things; while to this period, as the subsequent arrangement shows, belong not a few, such as "Tithonus" and "The Voyage," which were not actually published till later, and in which keen observers at the time of their publication detected as it were an older ring, a more genuine and unblended vintage. It is not improper therefore to break off here for a moment and to endeavour to state--leaving out the graces that can never be stated, and are more important than all the others--the points in which this new excellence of Tennyson differed from the excellences of his forerunners. One of them, not the least important, but the least truly original, because something distantly resembling it had been seen before in Keats and Shelley, is the combined application of pictorial and musical handling. Not, of course, that all poets had not endeavoured to depict their subjects vividly and to arrange the picture in a melodious frame of sound, not that the best of them had not also endeavoured to convey, if it were possible, the colours into the sense, the sense into the music. But partly as a result of the natural development and acquired practice of the language, partly for the very reason that the arts both of painting and music had themselves made independent progress, most of all, perhaps, because Tennyson was the first poet in English of the very greatest genius who dared not to attempt work on the great scale, but put into short pieces (admitting, of course, of infinite formal variety) what most of his forerunners would have spun into long poems--the result here is, as a rule, far in advance of those forerunners in this respect, and as an exception on a level with the very best of their exceptions. With Shakespeare there is no comparison; Shakespeare can send to every poet an "O of Giotto" in his own style to which that poet must bow. But of others only Spenser had hitherto drawn such pictures as those of the "Palace" and the "Dream," and Spenser had done them in far less terse fashion than Tennyson.