The Arthurian story which produced only middling moralizing in the _Idylls_, gave us as well the supremely written Homeric episode of the _Morte d'Arthur_, and the sharp and defined beauty of _Sir Galahad_ and the _Lady of Shallott_.

Tennyson had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty of minute painting in words, and the writing of these poems is as clear and naive as in the best things of Rossetti.

He had also what neither Rossetti nor any of his contemporaries in verse, except Browning, had, a fine gift of understanding humanity.

The peasants of his English idylls are conceived with as much breadth of sympathy and richness of humour, as purely and as surely, as the peasants of Chaucer or Burns.

A note of passionate humanity is indeed in all his work.