We have shown, we believe sufficiently, that Tennyson failed wherever he attempted to yoke the passions. His hand was too weak to curb them. His genius is reflective, introspective, descriptive. It has not the flash, the white heat of inspiration. It is always Tennyson who is singing, talking to, arguing with us, describing for us. He is a person, not a voice—a very pleasing, scholarly, refined, and in the main right-minded person—but he is for ever giving utterance to his own peculiar thoughts in his own peculiar style. The highest form of poetry, as of oratory, is not this. It is that undefinable and truest expression of feeling, of hope, of agony, of despair, of wrath, of courage, of any of the passions that lie dormant in the human breast, which at once elicits a responsive echo from the heart of humanity, so that we do not say, How sweet, how tender, how strong is this man, but, How true to nature is this thought! Thus it is that the greatest poets are the voices of all the world; their works the inheritance of all the world. In their highest heights they belong to humanity, and to no nation. The dramatic we believe to be the highest form of poetry, because it alone attempts to portray life itself, life in action; it is not a description, however magnificently done, of life. There lies between it and all other forms of poetry the difference that exists between the painting of a hero and the hero himself. The one is the man, thinking, living, moving, breathing, speaking his thoughts, doing his deeds; the other after all is only an image, more or less vivid, of him on canvas. It may catch the color of the eye, the expression of the countenance, the texture of the dress, the shape, the form; but at the very best it is a picture, no more, infinitely removed from the reality. If this be a right conception of the difference between dramatic and all other kinds of poetry—and it seems to us to be, although it might need more elaboration to impress it upon the reader’s mind—it will be plain that the dramatic poet needs nothing short of the highest inspiration in order to make him catch the very breathings of men’s souls and throw them into living forms, as truly as the master actor loses his own personality and lets it sink or become absorbed utterly in the various characters he portrays. No mere change of costume will effect the metamorphosis needed to impress the spectator with the reality of the change in character. In the same way no clipping of a poem into acts and scenes, and no allotting of certain lines to certain different names, will convert a descriptive poem into a drama. All the world will at once detect the fraud or the inherent defect.