Then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so young. And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. And I said "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee." One would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of Tennyson's genius. I think, however, they may be fairly quoted as lines suggesting the mid-Victorian atmosphere that clings round all but his greatest work. They bring before our minds the genteel magazine illustrations of other days. They conjure up a world of charming, vapid faces, where there is little life apart from sentiment and rhetoric. Contrast such a poem as _Locksley Hall_ with _The Flight of the Duchess_. Each contains at once a dramatization of human relations, and the statement of a creed. The human beings in Browning's poem, however, are not mere shadows out of old magazines; they are as real as the men and women in the portraits of the masters, as real as ourselves. Similarly, in expressing his thought, Browning gives it imaginative dignity as philosophy, while Tennyson writes what is after all merely an exalted leading article. There is more in common between Tennyson and Lytton than is generally realized. Both were fond of windy words. They were slaves of language to almost as great an extent as Swinburne. One feels that too often phrases like "moor and fell" and "bower and hall" were mere sounding substitutes for a creative imagination. I have heard it argued that the lines in _Maud_: All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ball-room orchestra merely for the sake of euphony. The mistake about the bassoon is a small one, and is, I suppose, borrowed from Coleridge, but it is characteristic.