But religion, as we have said, does not occupy a prominent place in Tennyson's pages. He is, in the main, like the great dramatist--a poet of this world. Love and women are his favorite themes, but love within the bounds of law, and woman strongly idealized. License finds in him no apologist, while he throws around purity and fidelity all the charms of song. The most rigid moralist can find nothing to censure in his treatment of the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere, the wedded love of Enid and Geraint, the meretricious love of Vivien, and the unrequited love of Elaine. If Milton had, as he intended, [Footnote 43] chosen King Arthur as the subject of his epic, he could not have taken a higher moral tone than Tennyson has in the _Idylls of the King_, and, considering how lax were his notions about marriage, it is probable he would have taken a lower one. [Footnote 43: See his _Mansas_, and Life, by Toland, p. 17.] King Arthur's praise of honorable courtship and conjugal faith is too long to be quoted here, but it may be referred to as equally eloquent and edifying. (_Idylls of the King_.) The Laureate has learned at least one secret of making a great name--not to write too much. "I hate many books," wrote Père Lacordaire. "The capital point is, to have an aim in life, and deeply to respect posterity by sending it but a small number of well-meditated works." This has been Tennyson's rule. With six slender volumes he has built himself an everlasting name. He has, till within the last few months, seldom contributed to periodicals, and when he has done so, the price paid for his stanzas seems fabulous. The estimation in which he is held by critics of a high order amounts, in many cases, to a passion and a worship. The specimen he has given of a translation of the _Iliad_ promises for it, if completed, all that Longfellow has wrought for the _Divina Commedia_. The attempts he has made at _Alcaics, Hendecasyllabics_, and _Galliambics_ in English have been thoroughly successful, and stamp him as an accomplished scholar. (_Boädicea_, etc., in _Enoch Arden and other Poems_.) As he does not write much, so neither does he write fast. The impetuous oratory of Shakespeare's and Byron's verse is unknown to him. He never affects it. He reminds us rather of the operations of nature, who slowly and calmly, but without difficulty, produces her marvellous results. {153} Drop by drop his immortal poems are distilled, like the chalybeate droppings which leave at length on the cavern floor a perfect red and crystal stalagmite. "Day by day," says the _National Review_, when speaking on this subject--"day by day, as the hours pass, the delicate sand falls into beautiful forms, in stillness, in peace, in brooding." "The particular power by which Mr. Tennyson surpasses all recent English poets," writes the _Edinburgh Review_, "is that of sustained perfection. ... We look in vain among his modern rivals for any