Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/194

 of the Revenge, Teiresias, to mention some of the more striking, were achievements of the first order in poetic force. There was no want of the rush of inspiration behind the verse; there was rugged vigour, sublime incoherence. The metrical forms could no longer bear the fulness of the poetic fervour. There was no over-niceness of precision; even the metre had grown less smooth, more Michalangelesque. It was as if the frost of eld was sending spikes of ice across the surface of the stream of verse. Thus, in the Crossing of the Bar, which was so mercilessly reiterated immediately after the poet's death, the third line of each stanza is wanting in the old smoothness and ring; yet it is the more effective for that. The rhythm is more complex, the harmony richer. This was the more needed, as Tennyson was never very rich in rhymes, the other expedient for giving mellowness to English verse. It was perhaps from a sense of this defect that he resorted so frequently and with such effect to alliteration.

It is in the Tennyson of these later days that we recognise the Master—the great poet-soul looming behind the poem, and greater than it. He rises at times to an almost prophetic strain. He had always been English of the English; if this had given him some narrowness of vision and sympathy, it gave