The passion of _In Memoriam_ is personal, is acute, is life-long, and thus it differs from the other elegies. Moreover, it celebrates a noble object, and thus is unlike the ambiguous affection, real or dramatic, which informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem stands alone, cloistered; not fiery with indignation, not breaking into actual prophecy, like Shelley’s _Adonais_; not capable, by reason even of its meditative metre, of the organ music of _Lycidas_. Yet it is not to be reckoned inferior to these because its aim and plan are other than theirs. It is far from my purpose to “class” Tennyson, or to dispute about his relative greatness when compared with Wordsworth or Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, or Burns. He rated one song of Lovelace above all his lyrics, and, in fact, could no more have written the Cavalier’s _To Althea from Prison_ than Lovelace could have written the _Morte d’Arthur_. “It is not reasonable, it is not fair,” says Mr Harrison, after comparing _In Memoriam_ with _Lycidas_, “to compare Tennyson with Milton,” and it is not reasonable to compare Tennyson with any poet whatever. Criticism is not the construction of a class list. But we may reasonably say that _In Memoriam_ is a noble poem, an original poem, a poem which stands alone in literature. The wonderful beauty, ever fresh, howsoever often read, of many stanzas, is not denied by any critic. The marvel is that the same serene certainty of art broods over even the stanzas which must have been conceived while the sorrow was fresh. The second piece, “Old yew, which graspest at the stones,” must have been composed soon after the stroke fell. Yet it is as perfect as the proem of 1849. As a rule, the poetical expression of strong emotion appears usually to clothe the memory of passion when it has been softened by time. But here already “the rhythm, phrasing, and articulation are entirely faultless, exquisitely clear, melodious, and rare.” {74} It were superfluous labour to point at special beauties, at the exquisite rendering of nature; and copious commentaries exist to explain the course of the argument, if a series of moods is to be called an argument. One may note such a point as that (xiv.) where the poet says that, were he to meet his friend in life, “I should not feel it to be strange.” It may have happened to many to mistake, for a section of a second, the face of a stranger for the face seen only in dreams, and to find that the recognition brings no surprise. Pieces of a character apart from the rest, and placed in a designed sequence, are xcii., xciii., xcv. In the first the poet says— “If any vision should reveal Thy likeness, I might count it vain As but the canker of the brain; Yea, tho’ it spake and made appeal To chances where our lots were cast Together in the days behind, I might but say, I hear a wind Of memory murmuring the past.