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And with this note of gladness and hope in the future the poem ends. Time heals all things, and time healed Tennyson's grief. But there was another reason, of which we hardly catch a glimpse in the poem, for his return to peace and hope. Another love had come into his life, the love of the lady who one day was to be his wife.
I already knew pretty well the origin of the Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, and Keats, and Shelley; and I did not come to Tennyson's worship a sudden convert, but my devotion to him was none the less complete and exclusive.
It was just like Tennyson's Lady Clara Vere de Vere, who "sought to break a country heart for pastime ere she went to town," for Vere would never be content to marry Will Dudley, even if she succeeded in winning him from Rachel. Poor Rachel! I felt so sorry for her; she has so little, and she's so sweet and content, and so innocent that a serpent has entered into her Eden.
"Walter Scott, then, will form a happy medium." "No, he wearies one with explanations and history." "Some of Tennyson's dainty idylls will suit your fastidious taste." "I couldn't abide his affected, stilted language to-day." "Shakespeare, then; you regard him as perfect." "No, he makes me think, and I do not wish to." "Well, here are newspapers, the latest magazine, and some new novels."
In Break, Break, Break, we hear a note prelusive to In Memoriam, much of which was already composed. The Poems of 1842 are always vocal in the memories of all readers of English verse. None are more familiar, at least to men of the generations which immediately followed Tennyson's.
Of this kind was Tennyson's adolescent vein, when he left "The poplars four That stood beside his father's door," the Somersby brook, and the mills and granges, the seas of the Lincolnshire coast, and the hills and dales among the wolds, for Cambridge. He was well read in old and contemporary English literature, and in the classics.
Were we asked to bring together the three most pathetic sentences in our tongue since Lear asked the question, "And have his daughters brought him to this pass?" we should select Swift's comment on the lock of Stella, "Only a woman's hair"; the cry of Tennyson's Rizpah, "The bones had moved in my side"; and Carlyle's wail, "Oh that I had you yet but for five minutes beside me, to tell you all!"
Thus the great Elizabethan. Now for the laureate of the Victorian age. For indeed I knew Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden passion for a maid, Not only to keep down the base in man, But teach high thought, and amiable words And courtliness, and the desire of fame, And love of truth, and all that makes a man. Chapman's strain is higher than Tennyson's, but they harmonise.
He and my father would sit on opposite sides of the fire; Mr. Sometimes he held a book of Tennyson's poetry to his near-sighted, prominent eyes, as closely as two materials could remain and not blend into one.
It is one of the heaviest indictments against the criticism of the mid-nineteenth century that this remarkable book the most remarkable first book of verse that appeared between Tennyson's and Browning's in the early thirties and The Defence of Guenevere in 1858 seems to have attracted next to no notice at all.