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Updated: May 18, 2025
Hitherto the contents of his collections of verse in the main fell into three groups poems which were interpretations of the passion of love, poems which dealt with art and artists, poems which were inspired by the ideas and emotions of religion. Unless we regard Ned Bratts as a poem of religious experience, we may say that these themes are wholly absent from the Dramatic Idyls.
One can well conceive the delight which his idyls must have given to those dusty Alexandrians, pent up forever between sea and sand-hills, drinking the tank-water, and never hearing the sound of a running stream whirling, too, forever, in all the bustle and intrigue of a great commercial and literary city.
But a fresher delight is to be found in the foot-paths, which go wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idyls and eclogues.
As it was, only a few months divided one from the other, and they are always, in my own mind, inseparable, or Siamese, twins. The book of poems called Undertones was the one; the book of poems called Idyls and Legends of Inverburn was the other.
It is perhaps too early to assign him his place in American literature. His picturesque books of travel, his Oriental lyrics, his Pennsylvanian idyls, his Centennial ode, the pastoral beauty and Christian sweetness of Lars, and the high argument and rhythmic marvel of Deukalion are sureties of the permanence of his reputation.
Cornelia van Osterzee has won her way to the highest position by her work in the larger forms. Among her best productions are two symphonic poems from the "Idyls of the King," entitled "Elaine's Death" and "Geraint's Bridal Journey." These were performed with great success at one of the recent Berlin Philharmonic Concerts.
But stepping out of idyls and novels, and stepping into American kitchens, is it not true that the larger part of the mothers see in their babies, or act as if they saw, only babies? And if there are three or four or half a dozen of them, as there generally are, so much the more do they see babies whose bodies monopolize the mother's time to the disadvantage of their souls.
Some of the verse that he wrote for use in his songs is of uncommon quality imaginative, distinguished in diction, and, above all, perfectly suited to musical utterance. Of uncommon quality, too, are some of the brief verses which he used as mottos for certain of his later piano pieces as for the "Sea Pieces" and "New England Idyls."
The creatures that stole across their path or started up as they passed, the crickets that chirped their little idyls at the roots of the great trees, the fire-flies that kindled their evanescent fires among the bushes, the night owls that hooted solemnly in the tree tops, the rustle of the leaves in the evening breeze, the gurgle of the waters over the stones in the bed of the brook, their own muffled footfalls, the patches of moonlight that lay like silver mats on the brown carpet of the woods, the flickering shadows, the ghostly trunks of the trees, the slowly swaying, plume-like branches, sounded only like faint echoes or gleamed only like soft reflections of a fairy world!
The rhythmical languor consequent on this verbal conformity, this lineal servility, is increased by a frequent looseness in the endings of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some pages, have contrary to all good usage the superfluous eleventh syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King."
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