It is a study of spiritual paralysis, achieved without the least resort to the rhetorical conventions which permit poetry to express men's silence with speech and their apathy with song.

Tennyson's Lotos-eaters chant their world-weariness in choral strains of almost too magnificent afflatus to be dramatically proper on the lips of spirits so resigned.

Andrea's spiritual lotus-eating has paralysed the nerve of passion in him, and made him impotent to utter the lyrical cry which his fate seems to crave.

He is half "incapable of his own distress"; his strongest emotions are a flitting hope or a momentary pang, quickly dissolved into the ground-tone of mournful yet serene contemplation, which seems to float ghostlike in the void between grief and joy.

Reproach turns to grateful acquiescence on his lips; the sting of blighted genius is instantly annulled by the momentary enchantment of her smile, whose worth he knows too well and remembers too soon:-- "And you smile indeed! This hour has been an hour! Another smile?
If you would sit thus by me every night I should work better, do you comprehend?
I mean that I should earn more, give you more." The tragedy is for us, not for him: he regrets little, and would change still less.