The same principle on which I have throughout insisted as the key to most of Tennyson’s best poetry is the key also to the moving tale “Enoch Arden,” where the tropical island around the solitary shipwrecked mariner is gorgeously depicted, the picture being as full-Venetian, and resplendent in color, as those of the “Day-Dream” and “Arabian Nights.” But the conclusion of the tale is profoundly moving and pathetic, and relates a noble act of self-renouncement. Parts of “Aylmer’s Field,” too, are powerful. And now we come to the “Idylls,” around which no little critical controversy has raged. It has been charged against them that they are more picturesque, scenic, and daintily-wrought than human in their interest. But though assuredly the poet’s love for the picturesque is in this noble epic—for epic the Idylls in their completed state may be accounted—amply indulged, I think it is seldom to the detriment of the human interest, and the remark I made about one of them, the “Morte d’Arthur,” really applies to all. The Arthur cycle is not historical, as “Harold” or “Queen Mary” is, where the style is often simple almost to baldness; the whole of it belongs to the reign of myth, legend, fairy story, and parable. Ornament, image, and picture are as much appropriate here as in Spenser’s “Fairy Queen,” of which indeed Tennyson’s poem often reminds me. But “the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet’s dream,” are a new revelation, made peculiarly in modern poetry, of true spiritual insight. And this not only throws fresh illuminating light into nature, but deepens also and enlarges our comprehension of man. If nature be known for a symbol and embodiment of the soul’s life, by means of their analogies in nature the human heart and mind may be more profoundly understood; while human emotions win a double clearness, or an added sorrow, from their fellowship and association with outward scenes. Nature can only be fathomed through her consanguinity with our own desires, aspirations, and fears, while these again become defined and articulate by means of her related appearances. A poet, then, who is sensitive to such analogies confers a two-fold benefit upon us.