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And it was his infancy spent upon this smiling but pirate-harassed coast that was chiefly responsible for this desired end in the epic of the Crusades; it was Tasso’s early acquaintance with the Bay of Naples, combined with his special training by the Jesuits, that forced the poet’s genius and ambition into this particular channel.
But the writer of English rhymed measures is in a very different position as regards improvisatorial efforts from the Italian who writes in rhymed measures. He has to grapple with the metrical structure—to seize the form by the throat, as it were, and force it to take in the enormous wealth at the English poet’s command.
But he wields the weapon of trenchant irony with terrible force, and he adds the poet’s power of vision and the true historian’s sense of reality and sense of individuality. He has Macaulay’s gift of orderly narrative. He is equally masterly in describing a battle scene, a meeting of diplomatists, a revolutionary movement.
There are clusters of rosy, happy children, clambering about its crumbling top; little knots of men too in the road beyond—evidently expecting something. Even this is in keeping with the poet’s grave, which should not be sombre and melancholy, like other graves; and what could better embellish and enliven its aspect than young, blushing life clustering around it?
His father’s family was of Lombard origin, having been long settled in the neighbourhood of Bergamo, where a crumbling hill-set fortress known as the Montagno del Tasso still recalls the name of the poet’s ancestors.
Dante, who sums up the spirit of the Middle Ages from the simplest reality to the sublimest ideal, alludes to garlands and garland-making as amongst the joys of the Earthly Paradise. In his poet’s vision of the pageant of the Church Militant he sees the last company wreathed with red roses, emblems to him of Charity or Love.
This description may seem a little fantastic, but it is only the poet’s way of telling us what we might ourselves experience if we would go in imagination to some thirteenth- or fourteenth-century castle, and seek to gain admittance. Sometimes the garden was within the castle fortifications.
Now go, and let me think yet more.” Simonides lingered. He was not sure Themistocles was master of himself. But the admiral beckoned peremptorily, the poet’s hand was on the cabin door, when a loud knock sounded on the other side. The prōreus, commander of the fore-deck and Ameinas’s chief lieutenant, entered and saluted swiftly. “Your business?” questioned the admiral, sharply.
His grandfather, apparently, wrote himself gentleman, not clerk; and there is no evidence that preaching had run in the family blood before it took that turn in the person of the poet’s father, who was quadruply clerical, being at once rector, prebendary, court chaplain, and dean. Young was born at his father’s rectory of Upham in 1681.
In the story of English poetry these relations held a place that was quite unique. What the biographer says about the poet’s sagacity, judgment, and good sense—especially what he says about his insight into the characters of those with whom he was brought into contact—will be challenged by no one who knew him. Still, the fact remains that Tennyson’s temperament was poetic entirely.
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