Lord Alfred Tennyson

Hieronder het artikel uit Chambers's cyclopædia of English Literature uit 1886 over Lord Alfred Tennyson.

LFRED TENNYSON, the most popular poet of his times, upon whom a baronage was conferred in 1883, is the youngest of a poetical brotherhood of three – Frederick, Charles and Alfred – sons of Rev. G.C. Tennyson, a Lincolnshire clergyman, who is described as gaving been a man remarkable for strength and stature, and for energy of character. He had a family of twelve children, seven of whom were sons. The eldest three we have mentioned were al educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, pupils of Dr. Whewell.

Alfred was born in the parsonage of Somersby (near Spilsby) n 1810. In 1829, he gained the Chancellor’s medal for the English prize poem, his subject being Timbuctoo. Previous to this, in conjunction with his brother Charles, he published anonymously a smaal volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers.

In 1830 appeared Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson. This volume contained poems since altered and incorporated in later collections. These early productions had the faults of youthful genius – irregularity, indistinctness of conception, florid puerilities, and occasional affectation. In such poems, however, as Mariana, Recollactions of the Arabian Nights, and Claribel, it was obvious that a true original poet had arisen.

In 1833, Mr. Tennyson issued another volume, shewing an advance in poetical power and in variety of style, though the collection met with severe treatment from the critics. For nine years the poet continued silent.

In 1842, he reappeared with Poems, in two volumes – this third series being a reprint of some of the pieces in the former volumes considerably altered, with many new poems, including the most striking and popular of all his productions. These were of various classes – fragments of legendary and chivalrous story, as Morte d’Arthur, Godiva &c; or pathetic and beautiful, as The May Queen and Dora; or impassed love-poems, as The Gardener’s Daughter, The Millar’s Daughter, The Talking Oak, and Locksley Hall. The last is the most finished of Tennyson's works, full of passionate grandeur and intensity of feeling and imagination/ It partly combines the energy and impetuosity of Byron with the pictural beauty and melody of Coleridge. The lover of Locksley Hall is ardent, generous, and noble-minded, “nourishing a youth sublime” with lofty aspirations and dreams of felicity. His passion is at first returned:

 

Extracts from “Locksley Hall.”

Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passid in music out of sight.

Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring;
And her whisper thronged my pulses with the fullness of the Spring.

Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,
And our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips.

 

The fair one proves faithless, and after a tumult of conflicting passions – indignation, grief, self-reproach, and despair – the sufferer finds relief in glowing visions of future enterprise and the world's progress

 

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Save the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder storm;

Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battleflags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

 

There is the marvellous brilliancy of colouring and force of sentiment and expression in this poem, while the versification is perfect. The ballad strains of Tennyson, and particularly his musical Oriana, also evince consummate art; and when he is purely descriptive, nothing can exceed the minute fidelity with which he paints the English landscape. The poet having shifted his residence from Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight, his scenepainting partook of the change.

 

The following is from his Gardener's Daughter:

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windly changing of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies

A league of grass, washed by a slow broad stream,
That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,
Barge-laden. to three arches of a bridge
Crowned with the minster towers.

The fields between
Are dewy-fresh, browsed by deep-uddered kine,
And all about the large lime feathers low,
The lime a summer home of murmurous wings.

The poet, while a dweller amidst the fens of Lincolnshire, painted morasses, quiet meres, and sighing reeds. The exquisitely modulated poem of The dying Swan affords a picture drawn, we think, with wonderful delicacy;

Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows;
One willow over the river wept,
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself as its own wild will;
And for through the marish green and still,
The tangled water-courses slept,
Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.

 

The ballad of The May Queen introduces similar scenery:

When the flowers come again, mother, beneath the waning light,
You'll never see me more in the long gray fields at night;
When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool.
On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the pool.

 

The talking oak is the title of a fanciful and beautiful poem of seventy-five stanzas, in which a lover and an oak-tree converse upon the charms of a certain Olivia. The oak-tree thus describes to the lover het visit to the park in which it grew:

Extracts from “The talking Oak.”

“Thus ran she, gamesome as the colt,
And livelier than a lark
She sent het voice through all the holt
Before her, and the park …

“And here she came, and round me played,
And sang to me the whole
Of those three stanzas that you made
About my “giant bole;”

“And in a fit of frolic mirth
She strove to span my waist:
Alas! I was so broad of girth,
I could not be embraced.

“I wished myself the fair young beech
That here beside me stands,
That round me, clasping each in each,
She might have locked her hands…

O muffle round thy knees with fern,
And shadow Sumner-chase!
Long may thy topmost branch discern
The roofs of Sumner-place!

But tell me, did she read the name
I carved with many vows,
When last with throbbing heart I came
To rest beneath thu boughs?

“O yes; she wandered round and round
These knotted knees of mine,
And found, and kissed the name she found,
And sweetly murmured thine.

“A tear-drop trembled from its source,
And down my surface crept.
My sense of touch is something coarse,
But I believe she wept.

“Then flushed her cheek with rosy light;
She glanced across the plain;
But not a creature was in sight:
She kissed me once again.

“Her kisses were so close and kind
That, trust me on my word,“
Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind,
But yet my sap was stirred:

“And even into my inmost ring
A pleasure I discorned,
Like those blind motions of the Spring,
That shew the year is turned…

“I, rooted here among the groves,
But languidly adjust
My vapid vegetable loves
With anthers and with dust:

“For ah! my friend, the days were brief
Whereof the poets talk,
When that, which breathes within the leaf,
Could slip its bark and walk.

“But could I, as in times foregone,
From spray, and brach, and stern,
Have sucked and gathered into one
The life that spreads in them,

“She had not found me so remiss;
But lightly issuing through,
I would have paid her kiss for kiss,
With usury thereto.”

O flourish light, with leafy towers,
And overlook the lea;
Pursue thy loves among the bowers,
But leave thou mine to me.

O flourish, hidden deep in fern,
Old oak, i love thee well;
A thousand thanks for what I learn,
And what remains to tell.

And the poet, in conclusion, promises to praise the mystic tree even more than England honours his brother-oak,

Wherein the younger Charles abode
Till all the paths were dim,
And far below the Roundhead rode,
And hummed a surly hymn.

 

The last two lines furnish a finished little picture. Still more dramatic in effect is the portrait of the heroine of Coventry.

Godiva

She sought her lord, and found him, when he strode
About the hall, among his dogs, alone…
She told him of their tears,
And prayed him, “If they pay this tax, they starve.”
Whereat he stared, replying, half amazed,
“You would not let your little finger ache
For such as these?” – “But would I die,” said she,
Het laughed, and swore by Peter and by Paul:
Then filliped at the diamond in her ear;
“O ay, ay, ay, you talk!” – “Alas!” she said,
“But prove me what it is I would not do.”
And from a heart as rough as Esau's hand,
He answered: “Ride you naked through the town,
And I repeat it;” and nodding as in scorn,
He parted, with great strides among his dogs.

She left alone, the passions of her mind –
As winds from all the compass shift and blow –
Made war upon each other for an hour,
Till pity won. She sent a herald forth,
And bade him cry, with sound of trumpet, all
The hard condition; but that she would loose
The people: therefore, as they loved her well,
From then till noon no foot should pace the street,
No eye look down, she passing; but that all
Should keep within, door shut, and window barred.

Then fled she to her inmost bower and there
Unclasped the wedded eagles of her belt,
The grim Earl's gift; but ever at a breath
She lingered, looking like a summer moon
Hald-dipt in cloud: anon she shook her head,
And showered the rippled ringlets to her knee;
Unclad herself in haste; adown the stair
Stole on; and like a creeping sunbeam, slid
From pillar unto pillar, until she reached
The gateway; there she found her palfrey trapt
In purple blazoned with armorish gold.

Then she rode forth, clothed on with chasity:
The deep air listened round her as she rode,
And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.
The little wide-mouthed heads upon the spouds
Had cunning eyes to see: the barking cur
Made her cheek flame: her palfrey's footfall shot
Light horrors through her pulses: the blind walls
Were full of chinks and holes; and overhead
Fantastic gables, crowding, stared: but she
Not less through all bore up, till, last, she saw
The white-flowered elder-thicket from the field
Gleam through the Gothic archways in the wall.

Then she rode back, clothed on with chastity:
And one low churl, compact of thankless earth,
The fatal byword of all years to come,
Boring a little auger-hole in fear,
Peeped – but his eyes, before they had their will,
Were shrivelled into darkness in his head,
And dropt before him. So the Powers, who wait
On noble deeds, cancelled a sense misused;
And she, that knew not, passed: and all at once,
With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon
Was clushed and hammered from a hundred towers,
One after one: but even then she gained
Her bower; whence reissuing, robed and crowned,
To meet her lord, she took the tax away,
And built herself an everlasting name.

 

An extract from The Lotus-eaters will give a specimen of our poet;s modulations of rhythm. This poem represents the luxurious lazy sleepiness said to be produced in those who feed upon the lotos, and contains passages not surpassed by the finest descriptions in the Castle of Indolence. It is rich in striking and appropriate imagery, and is sung to a rhythm which is music itself.

The Lotus-eaters

Why are we weighed upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown…
Lo! in the middle of the wood,
The folded leaf is wooed from out the bud
With winds upon the branch, and there
Grows green and broad, and takes no care,
Sun-streeped at noon, and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.
Lo! sweetened with the summer light,
The full-juiced aplle, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All is allotted length of days,
The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil…

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dump.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half0shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream!…
To hear each other's whispered speech;
Eating the lotos day by day,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces od our infancy,
Heaped over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

 

The most prominent defects in these volumes of Mr.Tennyson were occasional quaintness and obscurity of expression, with some incongruous combinations of low and familiar with poetical images. – His next work, The Princess, a Medley appeared in December 1847. This is a story of a prince and princess contracted by their parents without having seen each other. The lady repudiates the alliance; but after a series of adventures and incidents as improbable and incoherent as the plots of some of the old wild Elisabethan tales and dramas, the princess relents and surrenders. The mixture of modern ideas and manners with those of the age of chivalry and romance – the attempted amalgamation of the conventional with the real, the farcical with the sentimental – renders The Princess truly a medley, and produces an unpleasing grotesque effect. Parts of the poem, however, are sweetly written; there are subtle touches of thought and satire, and some exquisite lyrical passages. Tennyson has nothing finer than these stanzas:

Song, “The Splendour Falls”

The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bulge; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes woll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

 

The poet's philosophy as to the sexes is thus summed up:

For woman is not undeveloped man,
But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet love were slain: his dearest bond in this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world:
She mental breadth, nor fail in childware care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words.

 

In 1850 appeared, at first anonymously, In Memoriam, a volume of short poems, divided into sections, but all devoted, like the Sonnets of Shakespeare, to one beloved object – a male friend. Mr. Arthur Hallam, son of historian, and affianced to Mr. Tennyson's sister, died at Vienna in 1833,and his memory is here embalmed in a series of remarkable and affecting poems, no less than one hundred and twenty-nine in number, and all in the same stanza. This sameness of subject and versification would seem to render the work monotonous and tedious; so minute a delineation of personal sorrow is also apt to appear unmanly and unnatural. But the poet, though adhering to one melancholy theme, clothes ir in all the hues of imagination and intellect. He lifts the veil, as it were, from the inner life of the soul; he stirs the deepest and holiest of our nature; he describes, reasons, and allegorises; flowers are intermingled with the cypress, and faith and hope brighten the visits of the future. His vast love and sympathy seem to embrace all nature as assimilated with his lost friend.

Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.

The ship containing his friend's remains is thus beautifully apostrophised:

In Memoriam, IX.

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore,
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur's loved remains,
Spread thy full wings and waft him o'er.

So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirrored mast, and lead
Through prosperous floods his holy urn.

All night no ruder air perplex
Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
As our pure love, through early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above;
Sleep gentle heavens before the prow;
Sleep gentle winds as he sleeps now,
My friend, the brother of my love!

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.

Arthur Hallam was interred in Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, situated on a still and sequestered spot, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel:

The Danube to the severn gave
The darkened heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.

The twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.

 

We add one of the sections, in which description of external nature is finely blended with the mourner's reminiscences:

In Memoriam, XXII

The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
Through four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow:

And we with singing cheered the way,
And crowned with all the season lent,
From April on to April went,
And glad at heart from May to May:

But where the path we walked began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended following hope,
There sat the Shadow feared of man;

Who broke our fair companionship,
And spread his mantle dark and cold;
And wrapt thee formless in the fold,
And dulled the murmur on thy lip,

And bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow, though I walk in haste;
And think that, somewhere in the waste,
The shadow sits and waits for me.

 

With the genial season, however, his sympathies epand, and in one section of noble verse he sings the dirge of the old year and the advent of the new:

In Memoriam, CVI

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, acriss the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For that that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

 

The patriotic aspirations here expressed are brought out more fully in some of Mr.Tennyson's political lyrics, which are animated by true wisdom and generous sentiment.
The next publications of out author was an Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852) – a laureate offering, which he afterwards revised and improved, rendering it unworthy of the hero or the poet.

The Funeral of the Great Duke

O give him welcome, this is he,
Worthy of our gorgeous rites;
For this is England's greatest son,
He that gained a thousand fights,
Nor ever lost an English gun;
This is he that far away
Against the myriads of Assaye
Clashed with his fiery few and won;
And underneath another sun,
Warring on a later day,
Round affrighted Lisbon drew
The treble work, the vast designs
Of his laboured rampart-lines,
Where he greatly stood at bay,
Whence he issued forth anew,
And ever great and greater grew,
Beating from the wasted vines
Back to France her banded swarms,
Back to France with countless blows.
Till o'er the hills her eagles flew
Past the Pyrenean pines,
Followed up in valley and glen
With blare of bugle, clamour of men,
Roll of cannon and clash of arms,
And England pouring on her foes.
Such a war had such a close.
Again their ravening eagle rose
In anger, wheeled on Europe-shadowing wings,
And barking for the thrones of kings;
Till one that sought but Duty's iron crown
On that loud Sabbath shook the spoiler down;
A day of onsets of dispair!
Dashed on every rocky square
Theur surging charges foamed themselves away:
Last, the Prussian trumpet blew;
Through the long tormented air
Heaven flashed a sudden jubilant ray,
And down we swept and charged and overthrew.
So great a soldier taught us there
What long-enduring hearts could do,
In that world's earthquake, Waterloo!

In 1855 appeared Maud, and other Poems – the first, an allegorical vision of love and war, treated in a semi-colloquial bizarre style, yet suggestive and passionate.
Maud is the daughter of the squire, and “in the light of her youth and her grace” she captives a mysterious misanthropic personage who tells the story. But Maud has another suitor, a “new-made lord,” whose addresses and favoured by Maud's father and brother – the latter described as

that jewelled mass of millinery,
That oiled and curled Assyrian bull.

The squire gives a grand political dinner, “a gathering of the Tory,” to which the Timon-lover is not invited. He finds however, in the rivulet crossing his ground, a garden-rose, brought down from the Hall, and he interprets it as a message from Maud to meet het in the garden among the roses at night. He proceeds thither, and invokes the fair one in a lyric which is unquestionably the charms of the volume. It begins:

Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown.
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.

Maud obeys the call; but her brother discovers them, insults the intruder, and a duel ensues, in which the brother is slain. The lover flees to France, but returns to England, for ever haunted by visions of Maud, and then, in another section, we are startled to find him declare himself “dead, long dead,” and buried, but without finding peace in the grave! It is a vision, and the dreamer obtains a new excitement: he rejoices to think that a war is to arise in defence of the right:

That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease.
The glory of manhood stand on his ancient height,
Nor Britain's one sole god be the millionaire:
No more shall commerce be all in all, and Peace
Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note,
And watch het harvest ripen, het herd increase,
Nor the cannon-bullet rust on a slothful shore,
And the cobweb woven across the cannon's mouth
Shall shake its threaded tears in the wind no more.

And as months ran on, and rumour of battle grew,
“It is time, it is time, O passionate heart,” said I –
For I cleaved to a cause that I felt to be pure and true –
“It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye,
That old hysterical mock-disease should die.”
And I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath
With loyal people shouting a battle-cry,
Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly
Far into the north, and battle, and seas of death.

And the Tyrtean war-strain closes with a somewhat fantastic image:

And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

Maud was the least succesful of Mr. Tennyson's longer poems. But three years afterwards (1858) the poet redeemed himself by the publication of The Idylls of the King, consisting of four poems – Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere. This Arthurian romance was completed in 1869, by another volume, entitled The Holy Grail, and including The Coming of Arthur, Pelleas and Etarre, and The passing of Arthur – the whole of this Arthurian collection of idylls forming, according to Dean Alford, “a great connected poem, dealing with the very highest interests of man,” King Arthur being typical of the “higher soul of man,” as shewn in the king's coming, his foundation of the Round Table, his struggles, disappointments, and departure. Of the versification of the Idylls – pure, flowing, blank verse – we subjoin a brief specimen:

 

From “The passing of Arthur.”

Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:
“Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with a gift of myrrh.
but now the whole Round Table is dissolved,
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.”

And slowly answered Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chanins about the feet of God.
But not farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seest – if indeed I go
(For all my mind is clouded with the doubt) –
To the island valley of Avillion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever winds blow loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns.
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.”

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail< Moved from the brink like some full-breasted swan< That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere Revolving many memories, till the hull Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn, And on the mere the wailing died away.

 

Mr. Tennyson issued Enoch Arden and other Poems in 1864. In the character of a North Lincolnshire farmer, of the old school, he displays a vein of dramatic broad humour that surprised and gratified his admirers. A companion painting depicts a famrer of the new school, stolid and selfish, bit not so amusing as his elder brother. His dramas are Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1876), The Falcon (1879), The Cup (1881), and Promise of May (1882), none of which have been succesful on the stage. The Lover's Tale appeared in 1879, and Ballads, & c, in 1880.