_Maud_ was the third, and perhaps it may be said to have been, on a great scale, the last experiment in thus combining the temporal with the eternal. It was also probably the weakest as a whole, though the poet had never done more poetical things than the passage beginning, "Cold and clear-cut face"; than the prothalamium, never to have its due sequel, "I have led her home"; than the incomparable and never-to-be-hackneyed "Come into the garden"; or than the best of all, "Oh! that 'twere possible." It may even be contended that if it were ever allowable to put the finger down and say, "Here is the highest," these, and not the best things of the 1842 volumes, are the absolute summit of the poet's effort, the point which, though he was often near it, he never again quite reached. But the piece, as a whole, is certainly less of a success, less smooth and finished as it comes from its own lathe, than either _The Princess_ or _In Memoriam_. It looks too like an essay in competition with the "Spasmodic School" of its own day; it drags in merely casual things--adulteration, popular politics, and ephemera of all kinds--too assiduously, and its characterisations are not happy. There is a tradition that the poet met a critic, and a very accomplished critic too, who was one of his own oldest friends, and said, "What do you mean by calling _Maud_ vulgar?" "I didn't," said the critic, quite truly. "No, but you meant it," growled Tennyson. And there was something of a confession in the growl.