Alfred Tennyson

took Oxford by storm in the days of the undergraduateship of Clough and Matthew Arnold. Probably both of these young writers did not share the undergraduate en

able to tell Mr Lushington that "500 of my books are sold; according to Moxon's brother, I have made a sensation." The sales were not like those of Childe Harold or Marmion; but for some twenty years new poetry had not sold at all. Novels had come in about 1814, and few wanted or bought recent verse. But Carlyle was converted. He spoke no more of a spoiled guardsman. "If you knew what my relation has been to the thing called 'English Poetry' for many years back, you would think such a fact" (his pleasur

l Gordon. He had friends enough, and no desire for new acquaintances. Indeed, his fortune was shattered at this time by a strange investment in wood-carving by machinery. Ruskin had only just begun to write, and wood-carving by machinery was still deemed an enterprise at once philanthropic and ?sthetic. "My father's worldly goods were all gone," says Lord Tennyson. The poet's health suffered extremely: he tried a fashionable "cure" at Cheltenham, where he saw miracles of healing, but underwent

hat a nuisance these volumes of verse are! Rascals send me theirs per post from America, and I have more than once been knocked up out of bed

tle firstlings to Coleridge and Wordsworth: they are only the hopeles

n." Mr Browning tried to procrastinate: he was already deeply engaged with earlier arrivals of volumes of song. The poet was hurt, not angry; he had expected other things from Mr Browning: he ought to know his duty to youth. At the intercession of a relation Mr Browning now

spiteful genre of satire, its forged morality, its sham indignation, its appeal to the ape-like passions, has gone out. Lytton had suffered many things (not in verse) from Jeames Yellowplush: I do not know that he hit back at

est answe

tillness whe

nd genius. He was no hungry hack, and could, and did, do infinitely better things than "stand in a false following" of Pope. Probably Lytton had a false idea that Tennyson was a rich man, a branch of his

nd that curious felicity of style which makes every line a marvel, and an eternal possession. It is as if Tennyson had taken the advice which Keats gave to Shelley, "Loa

hts as fair wi

tes seen to w

rents of clear

lways existed in the world of poetic archetypes, and has now been not so much composed as discov

e illumi

splendour slan

lders, thick

es, and gems an

olden heads; t

wers in storm, som

l sweet I

f the poets

la Zouche. Such confusions are purposefully dream-like: the vision being a composite thing, as dreams are, haunted by the modern scene of the holiday in the park, the "gallant glorious chronicle," the Abbey, and that "old crusading knight austere," Sir Ralph. The seven narrators of the scheme are like the "split personalities" of dreams, and the whole scheme is of great technical skill. The earlier editions lacked the beautiful songs of the ladies, and that additional trait of dream, the strange trance-like seizures of the Prince: "fallings from us, vanishings," in Wordsworthian phrase; instances of "dissociati

The Princess was the opening of Love's Labour's Lost. Here the King of Navarre devises the College of

t shall be a l

ntemplative

ron, Domain,

hree years' term

ars, and to kee

*

o live and study

other strict

ee a woman i

*

come within a mile of my Cour

Four d

nalty. [Reads] 'On pain

with Cyril and Florian, as Charles did, with Buckingham, in

ss the cause w

ss, from a sportive treatment of the subject. The tavern catch of Cyril; the laughable pursuit of the Prince by the feminine Proctors; the draggled appearance of the adventurers in female garb, are concessions to the humour of the sit

ayer than the

tic fiction, The Princess presents higher proofs of origina

ights, her education, her capabilities, was not "in the air" in 1847. To be sure it had often been "in the air." The Alexandrian Platonists, the Renaissance, even the age of Anne, had their emancipated and learned ladies. Early Greece had Sappho, Corinna, and Erinna, the first the chief of lyric poets, even in her fragments, the two others applauded by all Hellas. The French Revolution had begotten Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her Vindication of the Rights of Women, and in France George Sand was prominent and emancipated enough while the poet wrote. But, the question of love apart, George Sand was "very, very woman," shining as a domestic character and fond of needlework. England was not excited about the question which has si

law of ancient Egypt. Gyn?ocracy and matriarchy, the woman the head of the savage or prehistoric group, were things hidden from her. She "

is the measur

Kaffir, Hott

these" as regards the position of women. Let us hear Mr Hartland: "In every Hottentot's house the wife is supreme. Her husband, poor fellow, though he may wield wide power and influence out of doors, at home dare not even

FitzGerald, who hated it and said so. "Like Carlyle, I gave up all hopes of him after The Princess," indeed it was not apt to conciliate Carlyle. "None of the songs had the old champagne flavour," said Fitz; and Lord Tennyson adds, "Nothing either by Thackeray or by my father met FitzGerald's approbation unless he had

women of the highest rank in letters-Sappho and Jane Austen. And "when did woman ever yet invent?" In "arts of government" Elizabeth had courage, and just saving sense enough to yield to Cecil at the eleventh hour, and escape the fate of "her sister and her foe," the beautiful unhappy queen who told her ladies that she dared to look on whatever men dared to do, and herself would do it if her strength so served her." [58] "The foundress of the Babylonian walls" is a myth; "the Rhodope that built the Pyramid" is not a creditable myth; for e

opped for one to

nd the secret

ove the Metaphysics," and perhaps has not yet produced

this

exercise of

l character, while

and lea

arms distincti

hat old strife between the women and the men-that war in which both armies are captured. It may not be acceptable t

Sydney Dobell, the poet of a few exquisite pieces, and F. W. Robertson, later so popular as a preacher at Brighton. Meeting him for the first time, and knowing Robertson's "wish to pluck the heart from my mystery, from pure nervousness I would only talk of beer." This kind of shyness beset Tennyson. A lady tells me that as a girl (an

speaking, he placed himself under the celebrated Dr Gully and his "water-cure," a foible of that period. In 1848 he made a tour to King Arthur's Cornish bounds, and another to Scotland, where the Pass of Brander disappointed him: perhaps he saw it on a fine day, and, like Glencoe, it needs tempest and mist lit up by the white fires of many waterfal