Lycidas and the speech over the death of Samson:—
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise or blame, nothing but well and fair,
With what may quiet us in a death so noble.
These meditations of the poet are wronged if any word is said about them in discussion of their substance; one may argue with Milton about 'the ruin of our corrupted clergy then at their height,' but not about his poetical doctrine of true Fame:—
That strain we heard was of a higher mood.
So we may hold that the thought of Tennyson is not so well bestowed in the argumentative poems (like that which Mr Gladstone refuted in the Nineteenth Century) as in some of those where he uses mythology, the legends of Tithonus or the Holy Grail, to convey his reading of the world. The difference between the two kinds of thought is very great; and the nobler kind is not discourse but vision. It does not lend itself
