Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/99

Rh by its moving panorama, the listener has painted all in his mind when the last word is uttered:—

It is to be noted, as we read, that Tennyson's personages, and those of Keats as well, are Artist-poets. mostly conventional figures, as characterless as those on a piece of tapestry. The genius of neither poet is preferably dramatic: they do not get at individuality by dramatic insight like Shakespeare, nor by monodramatic soliloquy and analysis, like the strenuous Browning. Their dramas are for the most part masques containing eidullia (little pictures); though who can doubt that Keats, had he lived, would have developed the highest dramatic power? Remember what the less sensuous, more lyrical Shelley achieved in "The Cenci," when only four years beyond the age at which Keats imagined his "gold Hyperion, love-lorn Porphyro." The poet infuses Life by his command of vocal movement. But, to resume, see what poetry, in addition to the foregoing counterfeit of the painter's ocular presentment, can bring about in its