Yet the danger has in fact proved real within the present and recent years, and seems about to threaten still more among the less judicious.  But it will not long prevail.  The vigorous little nation of lovers of poetry, alive one by one within the vague multitude of the nation of England, cannot remain finally insensible to what is at once majestic and magical in Tennyson.  For those are not qualities they neglect in their other masters.  How, valuing singleness of heart in the sixteenth century, splendour in the seventeenth, composure in the eighteenth; how, with a spiritual ear for the note—­commonly called Celtic, albeit it is the most English thing in the world—­the wild wood note of the remoter song; how, with the educated sense of style, the liberal sense of ease; how, in a word, fostering Letters and loving Nature, shall that choice nation within England long disregard these virtues in the nineteenth-century master?  How disregard him, for more than the few years of reaction, for the insignificant reasons of his bygone taste, his insipid courtliness, his prettiness, or what not?  It is no dishonour to Tennyson, for it is a dishonour to our education, to disparage a poet who wrote but the two—­had he written no more of their kind—­lines of “The Passing of Arthur,” of which, before I quote them, I will permit myself the personal remembrance of a great contemporary author’s opinion.  Mr. Meredith, speaking to me of the high-water mark of English style in poetry and prose, cited those lines as topmost in poetry:-

   On one side lay the ocean, and on one
   Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

Here is no taint of manner, no pretty posture or habit, but the simplicity of poetry and the simplicity of Nature, something on the yonder side of imagery.  It is to be noted that this noble passage is from Tennyson’s generally weakest kind of work—­blank verse; and should thus be a sign that the laxity of so many parts of the “Idylls” and other blank verse poems was a quite unnecessary fault.  Lax this form of poetry undoubtedly is with Tennyson.  His blank verse is often too easy; it cannot be said to fly, for the paradoxical reason that it has no weight; it slips by, without halting or tripping indeed, but also without the friction of the movement of vitality.  This quality, which is so near to a fault, this quality of ease, has come to be disregarded in our day.  That Horace Walpole overpraised this virtue is not good reason that we should hold it for a vice.  Yet we do more than undervalue it; and several of our authors, in prose and poetry, seem to find much merit in the manifest difficulty; they will not have a key to turn, though closely and tightly, in oiled wards; let the reluctant iron catch and grind, or they would even prefer to pick you the lock.