later works, as has been well remarked, he has shown himself thoroughly aware that in poetry half is greater than the whole.  That the chastity of style he has attained is not from exhaustion of power may easily be shown.  No poet has evinced a more despotic mastery over intractable materials, or has been more successful in clothing what is common with the dignity of his art.  The Downs are not the best subjects in the world for verse; but they will be remembered with and by his descriptive line in the “Idylls”—­

  Far o’er the long backs of the bushless downs.

[1] We use the word in what we conceive to be its only legitimate
    meaning; namely, after the manner and with the effect of painting. 
    It signifies the quid, not the quale.

How becoming is the appearance of what we familiarly term the “clod” in the “Princess”! (p. 37)—­

  Nor those horn-handled breakers of the glebe.

Of all imaginable subjects, mathematics might seem the most hopeless to make mention of in verse; but they are with him

The hard-grained Muses of the cube and square.

Thus at a single stroke he gives an image alike simple, true, and poetical to boot, because suited to its place and object in his verse, like the heavy Caryatides well placed in architecture.  After this, we may less esteem the feat by which in “Godiva” he describes the clock striking mid-day:—­

                                 All at once,
  With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon
  Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers.

But even the contents of a pigeon-pie are not beneath his notice, nor yet beyond his powers of embellishment, in “Audley Court":—­

                      A pasty, costly made,

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied.

What excites more surprise is that he can, without any offence against good taste, venture to deal with these contents even after they have entered the mouth of the eater ("Enid,” p. 79):—­

                  The brawny spearman let his cheek
  Bulge with the unswallowed piece, and turning, stared.

The delicate insight of fine taste appears to show him with wonderful precision up to what point his art can control and compel his materials, and from what point the materials are in hopeless rebellion and must be let alone.  So in the “Princess” (p. 89) we are introduced to—­

Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men,
Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain,
And labour.

It was absolutely necessary for him to heighten, nay, to coarsen, the description of these masses of animated beef, who formed the standing army of the woman-commonwealth.  Few would have obeyed this law without violating another; but Mr. Tennyson saw that the verb was admissible, while the adjective would have been intolerable.