...bell was asked to describe Tennyson, he replied, If he were pointed out to you as the man who had written the Iliad, you would answer, I can well believe it. This never seemed to be quite true of Tennyson , whose dark oriental look would rather have suggested the authorship of the Arab legend of Antar or of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam. But it was eminently true of the picturesqueness of Longfellow ...