immediately glides back into his curiosity as to the state of the
weather and the forwardness of the spring--
'If thou art blessed--my mother's smile
Undimmed--_if bees are on the wing_?'
No, we believe the whole circle of poetry does not furnish such another
instance of enthusiasm for the sights and sounds of the vernal
season!--The sorrows of a bereaved mother rank _after_ the blossoms of
the _woodbine_, and just before the hummings of the _bee_; and this is
_all_ that he has any curiosity about; for he proceeds:--
'Then cease, my friend, a little while
That I may'--
'send my love to my mother,' or 'give you some hints about bees, which I
have picked up from Aristaeus, in the Elysian Fields,' or 'tell you how I
am situated as to my own personal comforts in the world below'?--oh no--
'That I may--hear the _throstle sing_
His bridal song--the boast of spring.
Sweet as the noise, in parched plains,
Of bubbling wells that fret the stones,
(_If any sense in me remains_)
Thy words will be--thy cheerful tones
As welcome to--my _crumbling bones_!'--p. 4.
'_If any sense in me remains!_'--This doubt is inconsistent with the
opening stanza of the piece, and, in fact, too modest; we take upon
ourselves to re-assure Mr. Tennyson, that, even after he shall be dead
and buried, as much '_sense_' will still remain as he has now the good
fortune to possess.
We have quoted these first two poems in _extenso_, to obviate any
suspicion of our having made a partial or delusive selection. We cannot
afford space--we wish we could--for an equally minute examination of the
rest of the volume, but we shall make a few extracts to show--what we
solemnly affirm--that every page teems with beauties hardly less
surprising.
_The Lady of Shalott_ is a poem in four parts, the story of which we
decline to maim by such an analysis as we could give, but it opens
thus--
'On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and _meet the sky_--
And _through_ the field the road runs _by_.'
The Lady of Shalott was, it seems, a spinster who had, under some
unnamed penalty, a certain web to weave.
'Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early,
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel singing clearly....
'No time has she for sport or play,
A charmed web she weaves alway;
A curse is on her if she stay
Her weaving either night or day....
'She knows not'--
Poor lady, nor we either--
'She knows not what that curse may be,
Therefore she weaveth steadily;
Therefore no other care has she
The Lady of Shalott.'
A knight, however, happens to ride past her window, coming
----'from Camelot;[P]
From the bank, and _from_ the _river_,
He flashed _into_ the crystal _mirror_--
"Tirra lirra, tirra _lirra_," (_lirrar_?)
Sang Sir Launcelot.'--p. 15.
The lady stepped to the window to look at the stranger, and forgot for
an instant her web:--the curse fell on her, and she died; why, how, and
wherefore, the following stanzas will clearly and pathetically
explain:--
'A long drawn carol, mournful, holy,
She chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her eyes were darkened _wholly_,
And her smooth face sharpened _slowly_,
Turned to towered Camelot.
For ere she reached upon the tide
The first house on the water side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott!
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
To the planked wharfage came;
Below _the stern_ they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.'--p. 19.
We pass by two--what shall we call them?--tales, or odes, or sketches,
entitled 'Mariana in the South' and 'Eleaenore,' of which we fear we
could make no intelligible extract, so curiously are they run together
into one dreamy tissue--to a little novel in rhyme, called 'The Miller's
Daughter.' Millers' daughters, poor things, have been so generally
betrayed by their sweethearts, that it is refreshing to find that Mr.
Tennyson has united himself to _his_ miller's daughter in lawful
wedlock, and the poem is a history of his courtship and wedding. He
begins with a sketch of his own birth, parentage, and personal
appearance--
'My father's mansion, mounted high,
Looked down upon the village-spire;
I was a long and listless boy,
And son and heir unto the Squire.'
But the son and heir of Squire Tennyson often descended from the
'mansion mounted high;' and
'I met in all the close green ways,
While walking with my line and rod,'
A metonymy for 'rod and line'--
'The wealthy miller's mealy face,
Like the _moon in an ivytod_.
'He looked so jolly and so good--
While fishing in the mill-dam water,
I laughed to see him as he stood,
And dreamt not of the miller's daughter.'--p. 33.
He, however, soon saw, and, need we add, loved the miller's daughter,
whose countenance, we presume, bore no great resemblance either to the
'mealy face' of the miller, or 'the moon in an ivy-tod;' and we think
our readers will be delighted at the way in which the impassioned
husband relates to his wife how his fancy mingled enthusiasm for rural
sights and sounds, with a prospect of the less romantic scene of her
father's occupation.
'How dear to me in youth, my love,
Was everything about the mill;
The black, the silent pool above,
The pool beneath that ne'er stood still;
The meal-sacks on the whitened floor,
The dark round of the dripping wheel,
_The very air about the door,
Made misty with the floating meal!_'--p. 36.
The accumulation of tender images in the following lines appears not
less wonderful:--
'Remember you that pleasant day
When, after roving in the woods,
('Twas April then) I came and lay
Beneath those _gummy_ chestnut-buds?
'A water-rat from off the bank
Plunged in the stream. With idle care,
Downlooking through the sedges rank,
I saw your troubled image there.
'If you remember, you had set,
Upon the narrow casement-edge,
A _long green box_ of mignonette
And you were leaning on the ledge.'
The poet's truth to Nature in his 'gummy' chestnut-buds, and to Art in
the 'long green box' of mignonette--and that masterful touch of likening
the first intrusion of love into the virgin bosom of the Miller's
daughter to the plunging of a water-rat into the mill-dam--these are
beauties which, we do not fear to say, equal anything even in Keats.
We pass by several songs, sonnets, and small pieces, all of singular
merit, to arrive at a class, we may call them, of three poems derived
from mythological sources--Oenone, the Hesperides, and the
Lotos-eaters. But though the subjects are derived from classical
antiquity, Mr. Tennyson treats them with so much originality that he
makes them exclusively his own. Oenone, deserted by
'Beautiful Paris, evilhearted Paris,'
sings a kind of dying soliloquy addressed to Mount Ida, in a formula
which is _sixteen_ times repeated in this short poem.
'Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.'
She tells her 'dear mother Ida,' that when evilhearted Paris was about
to judge between the three goddesses, he hid her (Oenone) behind a
rock, whence she had a full view of the _naked_ beauties of the rivals,
which broke her heart.
'_Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die_:--
It was the deep mid noon: one silvery cloud
Had _lost his way_ among the pined hills:
They came--_all three_--the Olympian goddesses.
Naked they came--
* * * * * *
How beautiful they were! too beautiful
To look upon; but Paris was to me
_More lovelier_ than all the world beside.
_O mother Ida, hearken ere I die._'--p. 56.
In the place where we have indicated a pause, follows a description,
long, rich, and luscious--Of the three naked goddesses? Fye for
shame--no--of the 'lily flower violet-eyed,' and the 'singing pine,' and
the 'overwandering ivy and vine,' and 'festoons,' and 'gnarled boughs,'
and 'tree tops,' and 'berries,' and 'flowers,' and all the _inanimate_
beauties of the scene. It would be unjust to the _ingenuus pudor_ of the
author not to observe the art with which he has veiled this ticklish
interview behind such luxuriant trellis-work, and it is obvious that it
is for our special sakes he has entered into these local details,
because if there was one thing which 'mother Ida' knew better than
another, it must have been her own bushes and brakes. We then have in
detail the tempting speeches of, first--
'The imperial Olympian,
With arched eyebrow smiling sovranly,
Full-eyed Here;'
secondly of Pallas--
'Her clear and bared limbs
O'er-thwarted with the brazen-headed spear,'
and thirdly--
'Idalian Aphrodite ocean-born,
Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian _wells_--'
for one dip, or even three dips in one well, would not have been enough
on such an occasion--and her succinct and prevailing promise of--
'The fairest and most loving _wife_ in Greece;'--
upon evil-hearted Paris's catching at which prize, the tender and chaste
Oenone exclaims her indignation, that she herself should not be
considered fair enough, since only yesterday her charms had struck awe
into--
'A wild and wanton pard,
Eyed like the evening-star, with playful tail--'
and proceeds in this anti-Martineau rapture--
'_Most_ loving is _she_?'
'Ah me! my mountain shepherd, that my arms
Were wound about thee, and my hot lips prest
Close--close to thine in that quick-falling dew
Of _fruitful_ kisses ...
Dear mother Ida! hearken ere I die!--p. 62.
After such reiterated assurances that she was about to die on the spot,
it appears that Oenone thought better of it, and the poem concludes
with her taking the wiser course of going to town to consult her swain's
sister, Cassandra--whose advice, we presume, prevailed upon her to live,
as we can, from other sources, assure our readers she did to a good old
age.
In the 'Hesperides' our author, with great judgment, rejects the common
fable, which attributes to Hercules the slaying of the dragon and the
plunder of the golden fruit. Nay, he supposes them to have existed to a
comparatively recent period--namely, the voyage of Hanno, on the coarse
canvas of whose log-book Mr. Tennyson has judiciously embroidered the
Hesperian romance. The poem opens with a geographical description of the
neighbourhood, which must be very clear and satisfactory to the English
reader; indeed, it leaves far behind in accuracy of topography and
melody of rhythm the heroics of Dionysius _Periegetes_.
'The north wind fall'n, in the new-starred night.'
Here we must pause to observe a new species of _metabole_ with which Mr.
Tennyson has enriched our language. He suppresses the E in _fallen_,
where it is usually written and where it must be pronounced, and
transfers it to the word _new-starred_, where it would not be
pronounced if he did not take due care to superfix a _grave_ accent.
This use of the grave accent is, as our readers may have already
perceived, so habitual with Mr. Tennyson, and is so obvious an
improvement, that we really wonder how the language has hitherto done
without it. We are tempted to suggest, that if analogy to the accented
languages is to be thought of, it is rather the acute ([']) than the
grave ([`]) which should be employed on such occasions; but we speak
with profound diffidence; and as Mr. Tennyson is the inventor of the
system, we shall bow with respect to whatever his final determination
may be.
'The north wind fall'n, in the new-starred night
Zidonian Hanno, voyaging beyond
The hoary promontory of Soloe,
Past Thymiaterion in calmed bays.'
We must here note specially the musical flow of this last line, which is
the more creditable to Mr. Tennyson, because it was before the tuneless
names of this very neighbourhood that the learned continuator of
Dionysius retreated in despair--
----[Greek: eponymias nyn ellachen allas
Aithiopon gain, dysphonous oud' epierons
Mousais ouneka tasd' ego ouk agoreusom' apasas.]
but Mr. Tennyson is bolder and happier--
'Past Thymiaterion in calmed bays,
Between the southern and the western Horn,
Heard neither'--
We pause for a moment to consider what a sea-captain might have expected
to hear, by night, in the Atlantic ocean--he heard
--'neither the warbling of the _nightingale_
Nor melody o' the Libyan lotusflute,'
but he did hear the three daughters of Hesper singing the following
song:--
'The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit,
Guard it well, guard it warily,
Singing airily,
Standing about the charmed root,
Round about all is mute'--
_mute_, though they sung so loud as to be heard some leagues out at
sea--
----'all is mute
As the snow-field on mountain peaks,
As the sand-field at the mountain foot.
Crocodiles in briny creeks
Sleep, and stir not: all is mute.'
How admirably do these lines describe the peculiarities of this charmed
neighbourhood--fields of snow, so talkative when they happen to lie at
the foot of the mountain, are quite out of breath when they get to the
top, and the sand, so noisy on the summit of a hill, is dumb at its
foot. The very crocodiles, too, are _mute_--not dumb but _mute_. The
'red-combed dragon curl'd' is next introduced--
'Look to him, father, lest he wink, and the golden apple be stolen
away,
For his ancient heart is drunk with overwatchings night and day,
Sing away, sing aloud evermore, in the wind, without stop.'
The north wind, it appears, has by this time awaked again--
'Lest his scaled eyelid drop,
For he is older than the world'--
older than the _hills_, besides not rhyming to 'curl'd,' would hardly
have been a sufficiently venerable phrase for this most harmonious of
lyrics. It proceeds--
'If ye sing not, if ye make false measure,
We shall lose eternal pleasure,
Worth eternal want of rest.
Laugh not loudly: watch the treasure
Of the wisdom of the west.
In _a corner_ wisdom whispers. Five and three
(_Let it not be preached abroad_) make an awful mystery.'--p. 102.
This recipe for keeping a secret, by singing it so loud as to be heard
for miles, is almost the only point, in all Mr. Tennyson's poems, in
which we can trace the remotest approach to anything like what other men
have written, but it certainly does remind us of the 'chorus of
conspirators' in the Rovers.
Hanno, however, who understood no language but Punic--(the Hesperides
sang, we presume, either in Greek or in English)--appears to have kept
on his way without taking any notice of the song, for the poem
concludes,--
'The apple of gold hangs over the sea,
Five links, a gold chain, are we,
Hesper, the Dragon, and sisters three;
Daughters three,
Bound about
All around about
The gnarled bole of the charmed tree,
The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit,
Guard it well, guard it warily,
Watch it warily,
Singing airily
Standing about the charmed root.'--p. 107.
We hardly think that, if Hanno had translated it into Punic, the song
would have been more intelligible.
The 'Lotuseaters'--a kind of classical opium-eaters--are Ulysses and his
crew. They land on the 'charmed island,' and 'eat of the charmed root,'
and then they sing--
'Long enough the winedark wave our weary bark did carry.
This is lovelier and sweeter,
Men of Ithaca, this is meeter,
In the hollow rosy vale to tarry,
Like a dreamy Lotuseater--a delicious Lotuseater!
We will eat the Lotus, sweet
As the yellow honeycomb;
In the valley some, and some
On the ancient heights divine,
And no more roam,
On the loud hoar foam,
To the melancholy home,
At the limits of the brine,
The little isle of Ithaca, beneath the day's decline.'--p. 116.
Our readers will, we think, agree that this is admirably characteristic,
and that the singers of this song must have made pretty free with the
intoxicating fruit. How they got home you must read in Homer:--Mr.
Tennyson--himself, we presume, a dreamy lotus-eater, a delicious
lotus-eater--leaves them in full song.
Next comes another class of poems,--Visions. The first is the 'Palace of
Art,' or a fine house, in which the poet _dreams_ that he sees a very
fine collection of well-known pictures. An ordinary versifier would, no
doubt, have followed the old routine, and dully described himself as
walking into the Louvre, or Buckingham Palace, and there seeing certain
masterpieces of painting:--a true poet dreams it. We have not room to
hang many of these _chefs-d'oeuvre_, but for a few we must find
space.--'The Madonna'--
'The maid mother by a crucifix,
In yellow pastures sunny warm,
Beneath branch work of costly sardonyx
Sat smiling--_babe in arm_.'--p. 72.
The use of the latter, apparently, colloquial phrase is a deep stroke of
art. The form of expression is always used to express an habitual and
characteristic action. A knight is described '_lance in rest_'--a
dragoon, '_sword in hand_'--so, as the idea of the Virgin is inseparably
connected with her child, Mr. Tennyson reverently describes her
conventional position--'_babe in arm_.'
His gallery of illustrious portraits is thus admirably arranged:--The
Madonna--Ganymede--St. Cecilia--Europa--Deep-haired
Milton--Shakspeare--Grim Dante--Michael Angelo--Luther--Lord
Bacon--Cervantes--Calderon--King David--'the Halicarnassean' (_quaere_,
which of them?)--Alfred, (not Alfred Tennyson, though no doubt in any
other man's gallery _he_ would have a place) and finally--
'Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel,
Swarth Moses by the Coptic sea,
Plato, _Petrarca_, Livy, and Raphael,
And eastern Confutzee!'
We can hardly suspect the very original mind of Mr. Tennyson to have
harboured any recollections of that celebrated Doric idyll, 'The groves
of Blarney,' but certainly there is a strong likeness between Mr.
Tennyson's list of pictures and the Blarney collection of statutes--
'Statues growing that noble place in,
All heathen goddesses most rare,
Homer, Plutarch, and Nebuchadnezzar,
All standing naked in the open air!'
In this poem we first observed a stroke of art (repeated afterwards)
which we think very ingenious. No one who has ever written verse but
must have felt the pain of erasing some happy line, some striking
stanza, which, however excellent in itself, did not exactly suit the
place for which it was destined. How curiously does an author mould and
remould the plastic verse in order to fit in the favourite thought; and
when he finds that he cannot introduce it, as Corporal Trim says, _any
how_, with what reluctance does he at last reject the intractable, but
still cherished offspring of his brain! Mr. Tennyson manages this
delicate matter in a new and better way; he says, with great candour and
simplicity, 'If this poem were not already too long, _I should have
added_ the following stanzas,' and _then he adds them_, (p. 84;)--or,
'the following lines are manifestly superfluous, as a part of the text,
but they may be allowed to stand as a separate poem,' (p. 121,) _which
they do_;--or, 'I intended to have added something on statuary, but I
found it very difficult;'--(he had, moreover, as we have seen, been
anticipated in this line by the Blarney poet)--'but I have finished the
statues of _Elijah_ and _Olympias_--judge whether I have succeeded,' (p.
73)--and then we have these two statues. This is certainly the most
ingenious device that has ever come under our observation, for
reconciling the rigour of criticism with the indulgence of parental
partiality. It is economical too, and to the reader profitable, as by
these means
'We lose no drop of the immortal man.'
The other vision is 'A Dream of Fair Women,' in which the heroines of
all ages--some, indeed, that belong to the times of 'heathen goddesses
most rare'--pass before his view. We have not time to notice them all,
but the second, whom we take to be Iphigenia, touches the heart with a
stroke of nature more powerful than even the veil that the Grecian
painter threw over the head of her father.
----'dimly I could descry
The stern blackbearded kings with wolfish eyes,
Watching to see me die.
The tall masts quivered as they lay afloat;
The temples, and the people, and the shore;
One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat--
Slowly,--and _nothing more_!'
What touching simplicity--what pathetic resignation--he cut my
throat--'_nothing more_!' One might indeed ask, 'what _more_' she would
have?
But we must hasten on; and to tranquillize the reader's mind after this
last affecting scene, shall notice the only two pieces of a lighter
strain which the volume affords. The first is elegant and playful; it is
a description of the author's study, which he affectionately calls his
_Darling Room_.
'O darling room, my heart's delight;
Dear room, the apple of my sight;
With thy two couches, soft and white,
There is no room so exquis_ite_;
No little room so warm and bright,
Wherein to read, wherein to write.'
We entreat our readers to note how, even in this little trifle, the
singular taste and genius of Mr. Tennyson break forth. In such a dear
_little_ room a narrow-minded scribbler would have been content with
_one_ sofa, and that one he would probably have covered with black
mohair, or red cloth, or a good striped chintz; how infinitely more
characteristic is white dimity!--'tis as it were a type of the purity of
the poet's mind. He proceeds--
'For I the Nonnenwerth have seen,
And Oberwinter's vineyards green,
Musical Lurlei; and between
The hills to Bingen I have been,
Bingen in Darmstadt, where the _Rhene_
Curves toward Mentz, a woody scene.
'Yet never did there meet my sight,
In any town, to left or right,
A little room so exquis_ite_,
With _two_ such couches soft and white;
Nor any room so warm and bright,
Wherein to read, wherein to write.'--p. 153.
A common poet would have said that he had been in London or in Paris--in
the loveliest villa on the banks of the Thames, or the most gorgeous
chateau on the Loire--that he has reclined in Madame de Stael's boudoir,
and mused in Mr. Roger's comfortable study; but the _darling room_ of
the poet of nature (which we must suppose to be endued with sensibility,
or he would not have addressed it) would not be flattered with such
common-place comparisons;--no, no, but it is something to have it said
that there is no such room in the ruins of the Drachenfels, in the
vineyard of Oberwinter, or even in the rapids of the _Rhene_, under the
Lurleyberg. We have ourselves visited all these celebrated spots, and
can testify in corroboration of Mr. Tennyson, that we did not see in any
of them anything like _this little room so exquis_ITE.
The second of the lighter pieces, and the last with which we shall
delight our readers, is a severe retaliation on the editor of the
Edinburgh Magazine, who, it seems, had not treated the first volume of
Mr. Tennyson with the same respect that we have, we trust, evinced for
the second.
'To CHRISTOPHER NORTH.
You did late review my lays,
Crusty Christopher;
You did mingle blame and praise
Rusty Christopher.
When I learnt from whom it came
I forgave you all the blame,
Musty Christopher;
I could _not_ forgive the praise,
Fusty Christopher.'--p. 153.
Was there ever anything so genteelly turned--so terse--so sharp--and the
point so stinging and _so true_?
'I could not forgive the _praise_,
Fusty Christopher!'
This leads us to observe on a phenomenon which we have frequently seen,
but never been able to explain. It has been occasionally our painful lot
to excite the displeasure of authors whom we have reviewed, and who have
vented their dissatisfaction, some in prose, some in verse, and some in
what we could not distinctly say whether it was verse or prose; but we
have invariably found that the common formula of retort was that adopted
by Mr. Tennyson against his northern critic, namely, that the author
would always
--Forgive us all the _blame_,
But could _not_ forgive the _praise_.