Alfred Tennyson

t find an eagerness among their acquaintance for effusions in manuscript, or in proof-sheets. The charmed volume appeared at the end of the year (dated 1833), and Hallam den

the war with the "Cockney School" clung to him, the war with Leigh Hunt, and now he gave himself up to satire. Probably he thought that the poet was a member of a London clique. There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except that he did repent, that much of his banter was amusing, and that, above all, his censures were accepted by the poet, who altered, later, man

nt of the same or a similar legend in Elaine. It has the charm of Coleridge, and an allegory of the fatal escape from the world of dreams and shadows into that of realities may have been really presen

w-leavèd w

sheathed d

n the wat

bout Sh

an prefe

squally east

folded ar

er stood t

of Sh

n, the reader is too seriously sympat

ented in

oosely

was distressing; we were dropped f

emselves, their

el, abbot, squ

parchment on

d more than

ed wits at

of poetry should have been blind to the almost flawless excellence of Mariana in the South, inspired by the landscape of the Proven?al tour with Arthur Hallam. In consequence of Lockhart's censures, or in deference to the maturer taste of the poet, The Miller's Daughter was greatly altered before 1842. It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of Tennyson's domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The seventh stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to bring in "minnows"

O fire! o

g kiss my wh

lip

bserve Mr

he k

ut in a f

yrenees and the tour with Hallam. "It is possible that the poem may have been suggested

tus C

azily hand

shadowy," and "snowycoloured," "marblecold," "violet-eyed"-easy spoils of criticism. The alterations which converted a beautiful but faulty into a beautiful and flawless poem perhaps obscure the significance of ?none's "I will not die alone," which

ms owe more to revision. The early stanza about Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, and "Eastern

gracing that n

n goddesse

ato, and Neb

naked in th

n the Soul, being t

treams of da

ter Scott at

ntense, unt

id colour, sme

ered day

s, the "smell" gave him no "deep, untold delight," and

might have been expected to disdain topics well within the range of Eliza Cook. He did not despise but elevated them, and thereby did more to introduce himself to the wide English public than he could have done by a century of Fatimas or Lotos-Eaters. On the other hand, a taste more fastidious, or more perverse, will scarcely be sati

clergyman, has tol

esembling the Tennysoni

inson, a c

most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, enriched with many classical memories, and pictures of natural beauty gorgeo

o an aeronaut waving flags out of a balloon-except in a spirit of self-mockery which was not Tennyson's. His remarkable self-discipline in excising the fantastic and superfluous, and reducing his work to its classical perfection of thought and form, is nowhere more remarkable than in this magnificent vision. It is probably by mere accidental coincidence of thought that, in the verses To J.

y long wil

earts, as mo

above the

n heaven hal

onally fantastic and humourless character, the lack of early and general recognition of the poet's genius. The native prejudice of mankind is not in favour of a new poet. Of new poets there are always so many, most of them bad, that nature has protected mankind by an armour of suspiciousness. The world, and Lockhart, easily found good reasons for distrusting this new claimant of the ivy and the bays: moreover, since about 1814 there had been a reaction against new poetry. The market was glutted. Scott had set everybody on reading, and too many on writing, novels. The great reaction of the ce

ced (and even written out, which a number of his pieces never were), and were left in manuscript till they appeared in the Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of the author that the marvel is how he came to write t

blow like this drives a man on the rocks of the ultimate, the insoluble problems of destiny. "Is this the end?" Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthening doctrines of popular science, trained from c

h I fain w

e I'll n

be the

to wa

ially when they have declined to examine evidence, as in this problem of the transcendental nature of the human spirit they usually do. At all events Tennyson was unconvinced that death is the end, and shortly after the fatal tidings arrived from Vienna he began to write fragments in verse preluding to the poem of In Memoriam. He also began, in a mood of great misery, The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide. The poem seems to have been partly done by September 1834, when Spedding commented on it, and on the beautifu

ath of Arthur Hallam. But the application would have been unjust. True, the poet was living out of the world; he was unhapp

is whol

hat he could

ing. But he dwelt in no Castle of Indolence; he studied, he composed, he corrected his verses: like Sir Walter in Liddesdale, "he was making himsel' a' the time." He did not ne

They had first met in 1830, when she, a girl of seventeen, seemed to him like "a Dryad or an Oread wandering here." But admiration became the affection of a lifetime when Tennyson met Miss Sellwood as bridesmaid to her sister, the bride of his brother Charles, in 1836. The poet could not afford to marry, and, like the hero of Locksley Hall, he may have asked