Tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he was generally accepted as being. He was an artist of lines rather than of poems. He seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring full-armed from the imagination as the great poems of the world do. He built them up haphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels. They are full of sententious padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher's vacuous babbling in his sleep, as so much of Wordsworth is; it is the word-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, or things. Let us admit at once that when Tennyson is word perfect he takes his place among the immortals. One may be convinced that the bulk of his work is already as dead as the bulk of Longfellow's work. But in his great poems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect form, and expressed it perfectly. He did this in _Ulysses_, which comes nearer a noble perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. One can imagine the enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson is as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines hackneyed for us by much quotation: The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. There, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makes Browning's people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy illustrating an old story. One of the most beautiful lines Tennyson ever wrote: The horns of Elfland faintly blowing, has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of the world's romance. Tennyson's art at its best, however, and in these two instances is art founded upon art, not art founded upon life. We used to be asked to admire the vivid observation shown in such lines as: More black than ashbuds in the front of March; and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that Tennyson had a quick eye for the facts of nature. But such lines, however accurate, do not make a man a poet. It is in his fine ornamental moods that Tennyson means most to our imaginations nowadays--in the moods of such lines as: Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost.