How, in the Palace of Art, for instance,
they are unrolled slowly and gracefully, as if painted one after
another on the same canvass. The touch is calm and masterly, though
the result is looked at with a sweet, self-pleasing eye. Who can
forget such as this, and of such there are many, painted with as few
strokes and with as complete a success?
"A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand;
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white."
Tennyson delights in a garden. Its groups, and walks, and
mingled bloom intoxicate him, and us through him. So high is his
organization, and so powerfully stimulated by color and perfume, that
it heightens all our senses too, and the rose is glorious, not from
detecting its ideal beauty, but from a perfection of hue and scent,
we never felt before. All the earlier poems are flower-like, and
this tendency is so strong in him, that a friend observed, he could
not keep up the character of the tree in his Oak of Summer Chase, but
made it talk like an "enormous flower.
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