"The man is witless of the size, the sum, The value in proportion of all things, Or whether it be little or be much. Discourse to him of prodigious armament Assembled to besiege his city now, And of the passing of a mule with gourds-- 'Tis one! Then take it on the other side, Speak of some trifling fact,--he will gaze rapt With stupor at its very littleness, (For as I see) as if in that indeed He caught prodigious import, whole results; And so will turn to us the bystanders In ever the same stupor (note this point) That we, too, see not with his opened eyes." The import of an event is everything. Large imports may lurk more surely in the awakening of some obscure soul than in the pageantry of law bringing a tardy and wholly inadequate measure of justice to humanity. Though Tennyson talks of the "far-off divine event" he has no burning conviction of it and does not ride toward it with triumph in his eye and flaming joy in his soul. As he ambles along, steeping himself in the science of the time, its revelations make him nervous; he falls into doubt from which he can only extricate himself by holding on to belief, a very different thing from Browning's vision. Thus it happens that Tennyson voices the feelings of an immense class of cultured people, who have gone through the century in the same ambling fashion, a prey to its fears, intellectual enough to see the truths of science, but not spiritual enough to see the import of the dawn of the new day. Tennyson, then, quite of and in his time, would desire above all things to appeal to it as it appealed to him. He waxes enthusiastic over conventional politics, he treats his social problems so entirely in accordance with the conventions of the day that they are not problems at all, and he is quite in love with the beauty of aristocratic society, though he occasionally descends to the people for a subject. These are all entirely sufficient reasons for his popularity as a poet during his life, further emphasized by the added fact that having no subject matter (that is thought-content) wherewith to startle the world by strangeness, he took the wiser part of delighting them with his exquisite music.