25 
TENNYSON IN RELATION TO MODERN 
THOUGHT. 
By FRED. H. HILL, February 18th, 1890. 
John Stuart Mill says, ‘‘ Poetry is the expression of thought, 
coloured by feeling, expressed in metrical language, and over- 
heard.”’ 
The true poet does not speak at you, or to you, but within 
you. He rises above the world; cannot be kept to it: possesses 
a healthy mind, and has no disgust of life. He is a man like 
other men, only more so; with feelings like other men, only 
more susceptible; with vision, but with a clearer and wider 
range; with love, but boundless in its scope. 
Indeed, true poetry is the perfect registration of truth. It is 
the mysterious deep upon whose surface the face of nature is 
reflected, and in whose unfathomed bed pearls of thought and 
fancy lie. Art portrays beauty, but poetry has its vistas of 
glory, its vastness of view, its resources of suggestion. Art has 
its abiding reality, poetry its attendant dreams: the one is for 
the contemplation of the mind, the other for its expansion. In 
fine, the higher poetry is not like a photograph, still and cold, 
but like a painting, living and warm, not only in colour but in 
feeling, and at the same time is truthful in all its details. 
Through his sensitive nature the poet is exquisitely affected 
by the spirit and tendency of his time, and to render his work of 
future moment, he seeks to reflect that spirit, or seeks to confine 
himself to the expression of the spiritual experience of all 
ages and all mankind, the greatest example of the latter being 
Shakespeare, while in the case of the former the poet not only 
influences the period in which he lives, but is influenced by it, 
and of necessity becomes its representative. 
Our nineteenth century has been so eminently scientific, so 
devoted to investigation of universal truth, has found such 
wonders in the laws of force and matter, that the poetic bearing 
of their phenomena has seemed of transient worth ; and, con- 
sequently, the modern scientific student has often been so 
narrowed by his investigations that he has been more unjust to 
the poet than the poet was of old to the philosopher. 
So practical science has won over the multitude, and neither 
the songster nor the metaphysician, but the physical in- 
vestigator wears the bay leaves of to-day. No less a power 
