A breeze began to tremble o'er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
. . .
And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rocked the full-foliaged elm, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said
"The dawn, the dawn," and died away.
His are the exalted senses that sensual poets know nothing of. I think
the sense of hearing as well as the sense of sight, has never been more
greatly exalted than by Tennyson:-
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry.
As to this garden-character so much decried I confess that the "lawn"
does not generally delight me, the word nor the thing. But in Tennyson's
page the word is wonderful, as though it had never been dull: "The
mountain lawn was dewy-dark." It is not that he brings the mountains too
near or ranks them in his own peculiar garden-plot, but that the word
withdraws, withdraws to summits, withdraws into dreams; the lawn is
aloft, alone, and as wild as ancient snow. It is the same with many
another word or phrase changed, by passing into his vocabulary, into
something rich and strange. His own especially is the March month--his
"roaring moon." His is the spirit of the dawning month of flowers and
storms; the golden, soft names of daffodil and crocus are caught by the
gale as you speak them in his verse, in a fine disproportion with the
energy and gloom. His was a new apprehension of nature, an increase in
the number, and not only in the sum, of our national apprehensions of
poetry in nature. Unaware of a separate angel of modern poetry is he who
is insensible to the Tennyson note--the new note that we reaffirm even
with the notes of Vaughan, Traherne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake well in
our ears--the Tennyson note of splendour, all-distinct. He showed the
perpetually transfigured landscape in transfiguring words. He is the
captain of our dreams. Others have lighted a candle in England, he lit a
sun. Through him our daily suns, and also the backward and historic suns
long since set, which he did not sing, are magnified; and he bestows upon
us an exalted retrospection. Through him Napoleon's sun of Austerlitz
rises, for us, with a more brilliant menace upon arms and the plain;
through him Fielding's "most melancholy sun" lights the dying man to the
setting-forth on that last voyage of his with such an immortal gleam,
denying hope, as would not have lighted, for us, the memory of that
seaward morning, had our poetry not undergone the illumination, the
transcendent vision, of Tennyson's genius.
Emerson knew that the poet speaks adequately then only when he speaks "a
little wildly, or with the flower of the mind." Tennyson, the clearest-
headed of poets, is our wild poet; wild, notwithstanding that little
foppery we know of in him--that walking delicately, like Agag; wild,
notwithstanding the work, the ease, the neatness, the finish;
notwithstanding the assertion of manliness which, in asserting, somewhat
misses that mark; a wilder poet than the rough, than the sensual, than
the defiant, than the accuser, than the denouncer. Wild flowers are
his--great poet--wild winds, wild lights, wild heart, wild eyes!