Looking at Burns, Byron, Musset, or even at Shelley’s earlier years, youth sees in them the true poets, “sacred things,” but also “light,” as Plato says, inspired to break their wings against the nature of existence, and the _flammantia mænia mundi_. But this is almost a boyish idea, this idea that the true poet is the slave of the passions, and that the poet who dominates them has none, and is but a staid domestic animal, an ass browsing the common, as somebody has written about Wordsworth. Certainly Tennyson’s was no “passionless perfection.” He, like others, was tempted to beat with ineffectual wings against the inscrutable nature of life. He, too, had his dark hour, and was as subject to temptation as they who yielded to the stress and died, or became unhappy waifs, “young men with a splendid past.” He must have known, no less than Musset, the attractions of many a _paradis artificiel_, with its bright visions, its houris, its offers of oblivion of pain. “He had the look of one who had suffered greatly,” Mr Palgrave writes in his record of their first meeting in 1842. But he, like Goethe, Scott, and Victor Hugo, had strength as well as passion and emotion; he came unscorched through the fire that has burned away the wings of so many other great poets. This was no less fortunate for the world than for himself. Of his prolonged dark hour we know little in detail, but we have seen that from the first he resisted the Tempter; _Ulysses_ is his _Retro Sathanas_! About “the mechanism of genius” in Tennyson Mr Palgrave has told us a little; more appears incidentally in his biography. “It was his way that when we had entered on some scene of special beauty or grandeur, after enjoying it together, he should always withdraw wholly from sight, and study the view, as it were, in a little artificial solitude.”