"Whether it is to be desired," he wrote, "that a poem should require from common men a good deal of effort in order to comprehend it; whether all that is put in the mouth of the Soliloquist in 'Maud' is within the lines of poetical verisimilitude; whether this poem has the full moral equilibrium which is so marked a characteristic of the sister-works, are questions open, perhaps, to discussion. But I have neither done justice in the text to its rich and copious beauties of detail, nor to its great lyrical and metrical power. And, what is worse, I have failed to comprehend rightly the relation between particular passages in the poem and its general scope." Jowett wrote: No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind, or equal knowledge of human nature. No modern poem contains more lines that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any verse of Shakespeare in which the ecstasy of love soars to such a height. On the other hand, an anonymous letter, which Tennyson enjoyed repeating, ran thus: SIR--I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest you. You beast! So you've taken to imitating Longfellow. Yours in aversion, "----" "I shall never forget," his son writes, Tennyson's last reading of "Maud," on August 24, 1892. He was sitting in his high-backed chair, fronting a southern window which looks over the groves and yellow cornfields of Sussex toward the long line of South Downs that stretches from Arundel to Hastings (his high-domed Rembrandt-like head outlined against the sunset-clouds seen through the western window). His voice, low and calm in everyday life, capable of delicate and manifold inflection, but with "organ tones" of great power and range, thoroughly brought out the drama of the poem. "The peculiarity of this poem," Tennyson said, "is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters"; and the effect of his own recitation was to set this conception in clear relief by showing the connexion and significance of the linked monodies, combined with a vivid musical rendering of a pathetic love-story. The emotional intensity rises by degrees to the rapture of meeting with Maud in the garden, falls suddenly to the depth of blank despair, and revives in an atmosphere of energetic, warlike activity--the precursor of world-wide peace.