Torn by the scourge of the storm-wind that smites as a harper smites on a lyre, And consumed of the storm as the sacrifice, loved of their God, is consumed with fire, And devoured of the darkness as men that are slain in the fires of his love are devoured, And deflowered of their lives by the storms as by priests is the spirit of life deflowered. And here is neither Hellenic seasonableness and proportion, nor Hebraic fervour, nor truth as it is understood by either Hebrew or Hellene. It is the work of a man who endeavours to lash himself into an intensity which is not of him, and who trifles with a Hebraism which rejects him. Tennyson is, in point of the adaptation of form to matter, in the absolute justice and delicacy of his diction, in the perfect proportion and symmetry of his images, the completest reproduction among moderns of the Hellenic literary artist. What could be more luminously seen or more luminously expressed than The curled white of the coming wave, Glassed in the slippery sand before it breaks? Hellenic Tennyson is also in his appreciation of all beauty. More important, he is Hellenic in his tranquil open-eyed outlook upon the world. It is in these things that he is his best self. He is least himself when he seeks to pass into the prophetic sphere. He is _poeta_ more than _vates_, and he is least Tennysonian in a poem like "Maud." The Hebraic element in Tennyson is not innate, it is but what he has gathered from his training in Hebraic morality and the sentiment which comes of it. "His strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure" is not a sentiment natural to a pagan Greek, but it is natural enough to a christianised Hellene whose Hellenic temperament is otherwise quite unchanged.