NATURE NOTES IN TENNYSON'S POETRY. 127 
or Blossom-fragrant slipt the heavy dews 
(fathered by night and peace. 
Buzzings of the honied hours, 
and a hundred such lines will, when we have realised them, 
come back to us in country lanes when the honeysuckle and wild 
rose send forth their scents, and the dews are heavy with the 
flower of the lime. 
Perfume too is subtly suggested when vision only is named ; 
as : — 
Like two streams of incense free 
From one censer in one shrine. 
Who does not smell as well as see the twin columns of the sweet 
vapour, one on each side of the acolyte, as his censer swings 
rhythmically at Benediction ? 
Then all the sounds of the country are set forth in Tennyson, 
sometimes, it is true, with an over-abundance of imitation, where 
a mere suggestion would have been better. For instance : — 
Birds in the high Hall-garden 
When twilight was falling, 
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, 
They were crying and calling, 
is somewhat too realistic. A lover must have but slender sense 
of the melody of his lady’s name who fancies he hears it in the 
noisy cawing of the rooks. But as a rule we find a keen sense 
of the beauty of country sounds — 
Then, while a sweeter music wakes. 
And through wild March the throstle calls. 
Where all about your palace-walls. 
The sun-lit almond-blossom shakes. 
Or — 
She heard her native breezes pass 
And runlets babbling down the glen ; 
or the magnificent song of the echoes at Killarney, in which the 
guide’s bugle takes the whole tone of the grand and sweet nature 
around, and becomes 
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing. 
But of course the sense above all others by which we know 
external nature is that of sight, and here it is most interesting 
to find what Tennyson can teach us, and where are his limita- 
tions. He can show us, as perhaps no other can, the delicate 
minutiae of what he can take in his hand — the black of the ash 
buds, the flower out of the crannied wall, the veining of a leaf, 
the little speedwell’s darling blue, the moss on flower pots, the 
spots at the bottom of a blossom, the arrow seeds of the dande- 
lion ; and we understand the gain which compensates for much 
of the loss to shortsighted eyes lying in this microscopic 
minuteness of vision. If we did not know from a thousand 
portraits that Lord Tennyson was very near-sighted we could 
