"Byron and Shelley, however mistaken they were, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses; and so we are kept going"--a just tribute to their fiery lyrical energy, which did much to clear insular prejudice from the souls of a masculine generation. "Lycidas" he held to be the test of any reader's poetic instinct; and "Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all, though his blank verse lacked originality of movement." It is true that Keats, whose full metrical skill was never developed, may have imitated the Miltonic construction; yet after Milton he was the finest composer up to Tennyson's day. And the first hundred lines of "Hyperion" have no slight affinity, in colouring and cadence, to the Tennysonian blank verse. For indeed it was Keats who, as Tennyson's forerunner, passed on to him the gift of intense romantic susceptibility to the influences of Nature, the "dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching back into childhood." But Tennyson's art inclined more toward the picturesque, toward using words, as a painter uses his brush, for producing the impression of a scene's true outline and colour; his work shows the realistic feeling of a later day, which delights in precision of details. In one of his letters he mentions that there was a time when he was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike him as a picture, just as an artist would take rough sketches. The subjoined fragment, written on revisiting Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, contains the quintessence of his descriptive style; the last three lines are sheer landscape painting. MABLETHORPE Here often when a child I lay reclined, I took delight in this fair land and free; Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind, And here the Grecian ships all seemed to be. And here again I come, and only find _The drain-cut level of the marshy lea, Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary winds, Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea_. More frequently, however, he employed his wonderful image-making power to illustrate symbolically some mental state or emotion, availing himself of the mysterious relation between man and his environment, whereby the outer inanimate world is felt to be the resemblance and reflection of human moods. So in the "Palace of Art" the desolate soul is likened to A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand, Left on the shore; that hears all night The plunging seas draw backward from the land Their moon-led waters white.