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There is an artistic rhythm in the writings of the classical authors, like those of Cicero and Herodotus and Thucydides, as marked as in the beautiful measure of Homer and Virgil. Burke and Macaulay are as great artists in style as Tennyson himself. Plato did not write poetry, but his prose is as "musical as Apollo's lyre."
Thackeray did not realise that the Victorian platform was a moving platform. To take but one instance, he was a Radical like Dickens; all really representative Victorians, except perhaps Tennyson, were Radicals.
Had Edgar Allan Poe wanted an example for his theory of the impossibility of writing, in modern times, a long poem, he might have found it in Tennyson.
There was a volume of Shakespeare's plays, an "Ivanhoe," a much-thumbed "Lady of the Lake," a book of miscellaneous poems, a coverless "Tennyson," a dilapidated "Little Lord Fauntleroy," and two or three books of ancient and medieval history. But, though Mrs. Carew looked carefully through every one, she found nowhere any written word.
The roads in Europe, even in lonely and remote districts, where one may travel for hours without seeing a house, are usually in perfect condition, hard, white and absolutely smooth. Cf. Tennyson, In Memoriam, LXXII: The Greek God Apollo, later identified with Helios, the Sun-god.
But when he tells of his poverty to Emily Sellwood, the woman of his choice, there is anguish in his cry. In fact, her parents succeeded in breaking off her relations with Tennyson for a time, on account of his very uncertain prospects. His brothers, even those younger than he, had slipped into snug positions "but Alfred dreams on with nothing special in sight."
When Tennyson was once a passenger on a steamer crossing the English Channel, some people who had been assigned to seats opposite him in the dining saloon learned that their neighbor at table was the great poet. In a flutter of interest they listened for the wisdom which would drop from the distinguished man's mouth and heard the hearty words, "What fine potatoes these are!"
"Widow Jessup talks to us a lot of garrulousness about the climate and history and Tennyson and prunes and the scarcity of mutton, and finally wants to know where we came from. "'Spring Valley, says I. "'Big Spring Valley, chips in Paisley, out of a lot of potatoes and knuckle-bone of ham in his mouth.
The union of humanity in a universal commonwealth, which Tennyson had expressed as "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World," the goal of many theorists of Progress, becomes in Hugo's imagination something more sublime. The magic ship of man's destiny is to compass the cosmopolis of the Stoics, a terrestrial order in harmony with the whole universe.
Then it is sure to be lost, when the lender writes to say he wishes to recover it. Lord Tennyson has suffered from all these troubles to an extent which the average Bailee can only fancy by looking with his mind's eye through "patent double million magnifiers."
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