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Byrd," Miss Mason had summed up the popular view, in one of her rare romantic moments, "the love of a good woman !" Stefan had looked completely vague at this remark, and Mary had burst out laughing. "Why, Sparrow," for so, to Miss Mason's delight, she had named her, "don't be Tennysonian, as Stefan would say.
'With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood' great nonsense, of course, but I thought it fine!" It WAS fine, and was thoroughly Tennysonian. Scott, Campbell, and Byron probably never produced a line with the qualities of this nonsense verse.
In these splendid tales of knight-errantry we have the full flower of the poet's genius, narrated in the true romantic spirit, but with an ideality and imagination quite Tennysonian, and with a spiritualistic touch in harmony with "the voice of the age" that reminds us that,
This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise that if there was one man in English literary history who might with justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert Browning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of the Tennysonian poet.
He observed nature very closely by the brook and the thundering sea- shores: he was never a sportsman, and his angling was in the manner of the lover of The Miller's Daughter. These poems contain, as far as I have been able to discover, nothing really Tennysonian. What he had done in his own manner was omitted, "being thought too much out of the common for the public taste."
Camilla was beautiful, and supremely beautiful; she was tall, well and generously formed, graceful, fair, with fine eyes and fine dark chestnut hair; her absolutely regular features had the proud Tennysonian cast. But the coldness of Tennysonian damsels was not hers.
And Ruskin's other mind is still in the comical Tennysonian stage about war, dwelling with awe on swords and shields, glory, honour, patriotism, courage, spurs, pennants, and tearful but resolute ladies who wave their handkerchiefs in the intervals of sobbing over their "loved ones." He calls war "noble play." He scorns cricket.
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.
"The fires that arch this dusky dot Yon myriad-worlded way The vast sun-clusters' gather'd blaze, World-isles in lonely skies, Whole heavens within themselves, amaze Our brief humanities." As our American poet never elaborates in the Tennysonian fashion, he does not use science as material, but as inspiration.
Where government is founded upon the public conscience and the public intelligence the stability of States is a dream. Nor have we any warrant for the Tennysonian faith that "Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent."
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