And what
endeared Tennyson especially to me, the working man, was, as I afterwards
discovered, the altogether democratic tendency of his poems. True, all
great poets are by their office democrats; seers of man only as man;
singers of the joys, the sorrows, the aspirations common to all humanity;
but in Alfred Tennyson there is an element especially democratic, truly
levelling; not his political opinions, about which I know nothing, and
care less, but his handling of the trivial every-day sights and sounds of
nature. Brought up, as I understand, in a part of England which possesses
not much of the picturesque, and nothing of that which the vulgar call
sublime, he has learnt to see that in all nature, in the hedgerow and the
sandbank, as well as in the alp peak and the ocean waste, is a world of
true sublimity,--a minute infinite,--an ever fertile garden of poetic
images, the roots of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as
truly as any phenomenon which astonishes and awes the eye. The descriptions
of the desolate pools and creeks where the dying swan floated, the hint of
the silvery marsh mosses by Mariana's moat, came to me like revelations.
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