Our poet never strays from Nature; which has for him two sides,--the old duality, which is also forever,--the real and the ideal. To the one he brings the most patient fidelity of study; the other he reflects in every part of his poems in glowing imagery. "Enoch Arden" contains scenes which a Pre-Raphaelite might draw from,--as that "cup-like hollow in the down" which held the hazel-wood, with the children nutting through its reluctant boughs, or the fireside of Philip, on which Enoch looked and was desolate. On the other hand, no poet has so planted our literature with gorgeous gardens from which generations of lesser laborers will be enriched and prospered. The figures in which Tennyson uses Nature are not, moreover, strained or artificial; they do not distort or cover the inner meaning, but bloom from it, revealing its beauty and its sweetness. All bear the mark of loving thought,--now so delicate that its very faintness thrills and holds us, now strong and spirited and solemn. In this latest poem we find also the old surpassing skill of language, a skill dependent on the faculty of penetrating to the inmost significance both of words and of things, so that there is no waste, and so that single words in single sentences stamp on the brain the substance of long experiences. Witness this: Enoch lies sick, distant from home and wife and children; here is one word crowded with pathos, telling of the weary loss of livelihood, the burden slowly growing more intolerably irksome to the bold and careful worker wrestling with pain, and to the fragile mother of the new-born babe:-- "Another hand _crept_, too, across his trade, Taking her bread and theirs." See, again, how one line woven in the context shows where the tears came. Enoch, wrecked, solitary, almost hopeless, found that "A phantom made of many phantoms moved Before him, haunting him,--or he himself Moved, haunting people, things, and places known Far in a darker isle beyond the line: The babes, their babble, Annie, the small house, The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes, The peacock-yewtree and the lonely Hall, The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill November dawns and dewy glooming of the downs, The gentle shower, _the smell of dying leaves_, And the low moan of leaden-colored seas." We know of no more perfect rendering of an unlearned and trustful faith in God than this which Tennyson puts in the mouth of Enoch as he departs on the voyage from which he never returns to his wife:-- "If you fear, Cast all your fears on God: that anchor holds. Is He not yonder in those uttermost Parts of the morning? if I flee to these, Can I go from Him? And the sea is His, The sea is His: He made it."