Alfred Tennyson

ey lived at High Beech in Epping Forest, and after a bri

at this time; "for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things, except King Arthur, had been done." The age had not la tête épique: Poe had announced the paradox that there is no such thing as a long poem, and even in dealing with Arthur, Tennyson followed the exa

rald, and, coming from Coventry, wrote Godiva. His engagement with Miss Sel

-knife." Carlyle at this time was much attached to Lockhart, editor of the Quarterly Review, and it may have been Carlyle who converted Lockhart to admiration of his old victim. Carlyle had very little more appreciation of Keats than had Byron, or (in early days) Lockhart, and it was probably as much the man of heroic physical mould, "a life-guardsman spoilt by making poetry," and the unaffected companion over a pipe, as the poet, that attracted him in Tennyson. As we saw, when the two triumphant volumes of 1

acter, something that strongly resembled Tennyson himself. Among their common friends were Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes), Mr Lear of the Book of Nonsense ("with such a pencil, such a pen"), Mr Venables (who at school modified the profile of Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin. In town Tennyson met his friends a

py sails, and b

ss," and of the missionaries, means international complications; and "the markets of

d air a

contrivance

itigated optimism, and ha

ld hearts and

sophister

the socialist chants of Mr William Morris, or S

n the hands

n the lips of

d not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian patriot who said that his darling desire was "to cut the throats of all the curés," like some Covenanters of old. "Mais vous connaissez mon c?ur"-"and a pretty black one it is," thought young Tennyson. So cautious in youth, during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830, Tennyson co

student. A little cheap copy of Malory was his companion. [39] He does not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German "literature of the subject." Malory's compilation (1485) from French and English sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him

y maiden o

h

wrought it, sitt

den bases of

e adaptation of all are t

t hail nor rain

Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyso

verable in the

strong stream

wind for eve

her white wing

r swift rain s

, but all things

poets have been the lines of "the Ionian fa

exquisite and more English than the picture of "the garden that I love." Theocritus cannot be surpassed; but the idyll matches to

of the author of Men and Women rather than of Tennyson. The grotesque vanity of the anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St Simeon. From the almost, perhap

tself

rch oft openi

who had the courage to say so; though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an age when highly respectable matrons

r. It is of an early date, after Arthur Hallam's d

illes whom

rward, and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam." Assuredly the expression is more simple, and more noble, and the personal emotion more dignified for t

piled

l too l

one of his mariners. His last known adventure, the journey to the land of men who knew not the savour of salt

the better of the argument with the despairing Voice. The arguments of "that barren Voice" are, indeed, remarkably deficient in cogency and logic, if we can bring ourselves to strip the discussion of its po

crazy so

breathes with

ruly long'

reof our nerv

death, for

nd fuller, t

out a livelihood by publishing pessimistic books, and hooting

his matchless range of powers. Verse of Society rises into a charmed

broidery fr

to the qua

not know on what authority, that the poet had no recollection of composing Sir Galahad, any more than Scott remembered composing The Bride of Lammermoor, or Thackeray parts of Pendennis. The haunting of Tennyson's mind by the Arthurian legends prompted also the lovely fragment on the Queen's last Maying, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere,

stler, grim

In Break, Break, Break, we hear a note prelusive t

t. He had seen all the pieces in manuscript; they were his cherished possession before the world knew them. C'est mon homme, he might have said of Tennyson, as Boileau said of Molière. Before the public awoke FitzGerald had "discovered Tennyson," and that at the age most open to poetry and most enthusiastic in friendship. Again, the Poems of 1842 were short, while The Prince