Or one thinks of nearly all Tennyson's narrative poetry. The aim, one feels, was nearly always criticism of life, the life of all these myriads of personalities; not poetry, which is the illumination of the hidden life of the soul. It was for this reason that _Idylls of the King_, although flaming up here and there with such poetry as has not been excelled in any known literature, perhaps--yet fails as a whole to be a great poem. The Nineteenth Century was too insistent, and the troubles and problems of the day. Milton, dealing with matters beyond the crystalline and the brink of time, achieved the epic; but even Milton, coming down to Eden, heaven, and the familiar things of dogmatic theology, attained only to be ... Well, well, all honor to him; he deserves that all that should be lost and forgotten. Poetry and personality cannot be blended; they are a veritable God and Mammon. Then there are those charming stories of Tennyson's: _Dora_, _Enoch Arden_, _Almer's Field_, _The Princess_. He dignified them all with his own high gift of style; stamped on every line his own noble and melodious manner; adorned them all richly, and with consummate taste, with the best color of English rural life. Yet they remain essentially of the nature of prose; and we should not have been lured into thinking them poetry, but for the wonderful genius with which Tennyson handled them. The matter is the matter of the novel; and the style--what a wonderful style it is!--is rather the polished style that reflects light, the style of prose, than the white-hot luminosity of the genuine epic. Let us take, for example, _The Princess_, perhaps the most romantic and beautiful of this series, the one it takes the greatest temerity to speak of as not really poetic. Its aim is to throw light on, or to consider, or discuss, a certain present-day problem, that of the "emancipation of women"; and who shall say that that might not be done in prose? Is poetry to throw no light on our modern problems, or on contemporary problems, then? Turn to your Milton for an answer: Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword To force our consciences that Christ set free, And ride us with a classic hierarchy Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford? Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent Would have been held in high esteem with Paul Must now be named and printed heretics By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d'ye-call! But we do hope to find out all your tricks.