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A considerable number of the poems are amatory; they are the expression not of heathen sensuality, nor of sickly refinement, nor of fantastic devotion, but of manly love; and they illustrate the philosophy of the passion while they exhibit the various phases of its existence and embody its power.... Mr. Tennyson sketches females as well as ever did Sir Thomas Lawrence.
"I'm so sorry, Mr. Lane. But it's all your fault." And Claudia tried to make her face assume a look of gravity. A pause ensued, and then they both smiled. "What were you going to read?" asked Claudia. "Oh, Tennyson always read Tennyson. Kate likes it, because she thinks it's simple." "You flatter yourself that you see the deeper meaning?" Eugene smiled complacently. "And you mean Kate doesn't?
He thought Tennyson had used it also. The parting of the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage attributed to "M. Loisne," printed in the Boston "Evening Transcript" for October 23d, 1859. Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks of the showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to the Atlantic, one to the Pacific.
In that miserable season is held the Tourney of the Dead Innocence, with the blood-red prize of rubies. With a wise touch Tennyson has represented the Court as fallen not into vice only and crime, but into positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament is a carnival of the "smart" and the third-rate.
The play was "The Charlatan," the work of that other apostle, whose outspoken Epistles to the English chronically relieve the dull decorum of London journalism; the man of whom Tennyson came near writing Buchanan to right of him, Buchanan to left of him, Buchanan in front of him, Volleyed and thundered. But that night it was the audience that volleyed and thundered, in unanimous applause.
Andrew Lang says somewhere that the logical consequence of the formal theory of art in all its nakedness would make Tennyson the youth, Swinburne, and Edgar Poe the greatest poets of the world, and those delicious effusions of Edward Lear, "The Jumblies" and "On the Coast of Coromandel," masterpieces.
My grandfather when he was eighty years old would take down his pole as eagerly as any boy, and step off with wonderful elasticity toward the beloved streams; it used to try my young legs a good deal to follow him, specially on the return trip. And no poet was ever more innocent of worldly success or ambition. For, to paraphrase Tennyson,
Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies. I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.—TENNYSON.
That a crowd of people should listen to such stuff on a Sunday afternoon, when they might be taking a walk or enjoying a snooze, is a striking evidence of the degeneration of the human mind, at least in the circles of Methodism. Mr. Hughes praises Tennyson for "conscientiousness in the use and choice of words."
It is often worth our while to inquire how poetry has become such as it is, and how the altered and improved phases of versification have arisen. To trace our melody from Chaucer to Tennyson is matter of interest to us all. Of Cicero as a poet we may say that he found Latin versification rough, and left it smooth and musical.
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