Now it will be said that there is compassion in the passage quoted from _The Princess_; and undoubtedly there is; but is not the effort all to manifest it, to make it plain to every one that it is there, to lead it from picture to picture that will feed and excite it? We may say that it is a voice from below upward, an inspiration; it has the style and atmosphere of a great endeavor of the personal self towards the soul: whereas in the other cases, it is the comment and utterance of the soul itself. _There_, there is no effort to manifest compassion; the effort is all to suppress and control it. The effort is like the metal walls of a bomb, without which the explosive would only fizzle and waste. The poet--Swinburne, Milton, or Dante--had no doubt of his dynamite; it was too mighty, too awesome a thing; all he must do is to make the bomb walls strong, strong, strong. So, in reading, we get the effect, and are blown up--to the altitudes of consciousness. Tennyson, being also a poet, and therefore knowing the nature of dynamite; but writing here, not poetry, but mere criticism of life in the guise of poetry, puts what he can, out of his memory, of dynamite into his work: infuses what he may of the atmosphere of compassion into it. Swinburne and Dante and Milton have a Niagara to deal with, and they must make the channel of it as small as they may; they must dam it as well as they can, or heaven knows where they and the world would be swept to--mere incoherence and blind fury perhaps, or silence. Tennyson (in this case) has to deal with an irrigation scheme, and must make his channels as wide and deep as he can, and coax the waters of the world into them. Then, too, see how he deals with that other quality. He knew well enough that it is integral in the Grand Manner of Poetry, and he will weave it in here, if he may. So we have: Far from all men I built a fold for them: * * * * * And prospered; till a _rout of saucy boys Brake on us at our books_. There is no doubt what quality that is; scorn, indignation, separateness, bitterness, hostility. It is a personal imitation of loftiness, the compassionate element has quite vanished from it; there is all the difference in the world between it and the fierce pity of-- these slaves of men should beat Bosoms too lean to suckle sons, And fruitless as their orisons: or the sudden stern mercy implied in-- la Montagna Che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti: or the serene, august luminance of compassion shining through-- His form had not yet lost All her original brightness. Or, since the compassion is out of it, we might compare it with those many lines from Milton that convey only the sense of the grandeur, without the compassion, of the soul; lines such as these: An old and haughty nation, proud in arms; or: