84 
NATURE NOTES. 
degree that he did himself, yet the ver}- name of Tennyson will 
carry the reader back to the days when he revelled in the delights 
of the English Idylls, reading the precious volume amid the 
carols of bird-voices from the wood, the cawing of rooks, and the 
lowing of kine knee-deep in the river-shallows, when 
“ Twilight poured 
On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 
Softer than sleep.” 
As a painter of the beauties of Nature for their own sake, 
Tennyson is superb. In delineating the contour of the land, he 
allows himself a freedom of composition unknown to the art of 
Wordsworth ; and it is this that lends to his pictures a brilliance 
which is one of their chief characteristics. These pictures are 
flashed upon the very senses of the reader and not merely upon 
his perception. The composition of landscape in “Khubla Khan” 
is scarcely more bold than it is in some of Tennyson’s quiet 
pictures. So consummate an artist is he in rendering the 
scenery of his native land, that his exercise of this faculty has 
often proved a stumbling-block to many who have tried to 
localise his pictures. In singing the song of the brook, he is not 
celebrating one particular streamlet ; but the burden of his 
immortal song gives us the summer setting of the fairy forelands, 
the sailing blossom, the fresh wet ferns of any flat country. In 
the power of calling up imaginary landscapes, Tennyson is un- 
surpassed among English poets. Had he been as familiar with 
the loveliness of the Pacific islands as Louis Stevenson, he could 
not have described it better than he has in the last eight lines of 
those marvellous verses to Milton, the whole of which, as a 
splendid specimen of Alcaics, is well worthy of attention : — 
“ O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies ; 
O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity ; 
God-gifted organ-voice of England, 
Milton, a name to resound for ages ; 
Whose Titan-angels, Gabriel, .\bdiel, 
Starred from Jehovah’s gorgeous armories. 
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean 
Rings to the roar of an angel-onset ; 
Me rather all that bowery loneliness. 
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, 
And bloom profuse and Cedar arches 
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean. 
Where some refulgent sunset of India 
Streams o’er a rich ambrosial ocean-isle, 
And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods 
Whisper in odorous heights of even.” 
Tennyson stands high among Nature-poets as a painter of 
the vegetable world of England, which seems to share in his 
enjoyment of 
“ Groves that looked a perfect paradise 
Of blossom, over sheets of hyacinth. 
That seemed the heavens upbre.iking through the earth.” 
