As regards Tennyson's imagery, anything that one quotes in illustration is, as I have said, certain to be extremely familiar; but even familiarity can hardly dull the beauty of such a touch as that about Merlin's musings: "So dark a forethought rolled about his brain, As on a dull day in an Ocean cave The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall In silence." Or of that which puts in vivid form the estrangement of Enid and Geraint: "The two remained Apart by all the chamber's width, and mute As creatures voiceless through the fault of birth, Or two wild men, supporters of a shield, Painted, who stare at open space, nor glance The one at other, parted by the shield." Happy, in short, the poet who can offer his heroine for her dress ----"a splendid silk of foreign loom, Where, like a shoaling sea, the lovely blue Played into green." I have touched here only upon Tennyson's narrative poems, because they seemed most in order in any discussion of the author's dramatic faculty. They cannot be said to place it in an eminent light, and they remind one more of the courage than of the discretion embodied in _Queen Mary_. Lovely pictures of things standing, with a sort of conscious stillness, for their poetic likeness, measured speeches, full of delicate harmonies and curious cadences--these things they contain in plenty, but little of that liberal handling of cross-speaking passion and humour which, with a strong constructive faculty, we regard as the sign of a genuine dramatist. The dramatic form seems to me of all literary forms the very noblest, I have so extreme a relish for it that I am half afraid to trust myself to praise it, lest I should seem to be merely rhapsodizing. But to be really noble it must be quite itself, and between a poor drama and a fine one there is, I think, a wider interval than anywhere else in the scale of success. A sequence of speeches headed by proper names--a string of dialogues broken into acts and scenes--does not constitute a drama; not even when the speeches are very clever and the dialogue bristles with "points."