It is this very accuracy that almost forces us at this time to minimise and dispraise Tennyson's work.

We have passed from Victorian certainties, and so he is apt when he writes in the mood of _Locksley Hall_ and the rest, to appear to us a little shallow, a little empty, and a little pretentious.
His earlier poetry, before he took upon himself the burden of the age, is his best work, and it bears strongly marked upon it the influence of Keats.

Such a poem for instance as _Oenone_ shows an extraordinarily fine sense of language and melody, and the capacity caught from Keats of conveying a rich and highly coloured pictorial effect.

No other poet, save Keats, has had a sense of colour so highly developed as Tennyson's.
From his boyhood he was an exceedingly close and sympathetic observer of the outward forms of nature, and he makes a splendid use of what his eyes had taught him in these earlier poems.

Later his interest in insects and birds and flowers outran the legitimate opportunity he possessed of using it in poetry.