He knows that "This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the centre set the starry tides And eddied wild suns that wheeling cast The planets." just as he knows what the catkins on the willows are like, or the names of the butterflies: but he is capable, on occasion of "dragging it in," as in "The nebulous star we call the sun, If that hypothesis of theirs be sound." from the mere pride in his familiarity with the last new thing.

His dealings with science, that is, no more than his dealings with nature, have that inevitableness, that spontaneous appropriateness that we feel we have a right to ask from great poetry.
Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for his theory of the impossibility of writing, in modern times, a long poem, he might have found it in Tennyson.

His strength is in his shorter pieces; even where as in _In Memoriam_ he has conceived and written something at once extended and beautiful, the beauty lies rather in the separate parts; the thing is more in the nature of a sonnet sequence than a continuous poem.

Of his other larger works, the _Princess_, a scarcely happy blend between burlesque in the manner of the _Rape of the Lock_, and a serious apostleship of the liberation of women, is solely redeemed by these lyrics.

Tennyson's innate conservatism hardly squared with the liberalising tendencies he caught from the more advanced thought of his age, in writing it.