Alfred Tennyson

“ Whirl'd by the wind, had roll'd me deep below,
⁠Then when I left my home."
Her slow full words sank thro' the silence drear,
⁠As thunder-drops fall on a sleeping sea:
Sudden I heard a voice that cried, "Come here,
⁠That I may look on thee."
I turning saw, throned on a flowery rise,
⁠One sitting on a crimson scarf unroll'd;
A queen, with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes,
⁠Brow-bound with burning gold.
She, flashing forth a haughty smile, began:
⁠"I govern'd men by change, and so I sway'd
All moods.⁠'Tis long since I have seen a man. ”

“ Of this profound and blessed reliance on the all-sufficiency of his art, perhaps no poet ever furnished a more complete example than Alfred Tennyson. There is nothing stirring, nothing restless, nothing ambitious, in its tone ”

“ This poem and very many others were written by Alfred Tennyson, the great poet, who was made by the Queen Poet Laureate of England, and then, many years afterwards, Lord Tennyson, by which name you will always hear him spoken of.
There is a story told of how the first verses Alfred Tennyson ever made were written. His father was a clergyman, and Alfred and his brothers and sisters lived all their lives in the country, running wild in the woods and the fields, and learning all about birds and flowers, until they were old enough to go to school. ”

“ In the summer of 1835 Thompson spent the Long Vacation at the Lakes, and Spedding was engaged in securing lodgings for him and his pupils, while Tennyson was still at Mirehouse.
“I am going,” he writes, “with Alfred, I believe, to Buttermere, and so have not time to tell you how much I am rejoiced that your destiny should have dragged you hither—nor to discuss the London Review—nor to tell you about Fitz [Pg 403] and Alfred Tennyson, and Hartley Coleridge, and W. W., etc., only that Alfred is very gruff and unmanageable, and the weather very cold. He desires to be remembered. ”

“ I am that Rosamond, whom men call fair,
If what I was I be.
lxiv.
"Would I had been some maiden coarse and poor!
O me! that I should ever see the light!
Those dragon eyes of anger'd Eleanor
Do hunt me, day and night."
lxv.
She ceased in tears, fallen from hope and trust:
To whom the Egyptian: "O, you tamely died!
You should have clung to Fulvia's waist, and thrust
The dagger thro' her side."
lxvi.
With that sharp sound the white dawn's creeping beams,
Stol'n to my brain, dissolved the mystery
Of folded sleep. The captain of my dreams
Ruled in the eastern sky. ”

“ How the friendship came about which has found such undying record in this Poem, is soon told. Alfred Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam met, as undergraduates, at Trinity College, Cambridge, about the year 1828. Tennyson, born in 1809, was the older by one year and a half. Both [Pg xviii] these young men were inheritors of remarkable ability—the one being a son of the distinguished historian, and the other a son of an accomplished divine—both, too, were themselves highly educated, and one at least was possessed of the highest genius. ”

“ He answered: 'Earl, entreat her by my love,
Albeit I give no reason but my wish,
That she ride with me in her faded silk.'
Yniol with that hard message went; it fell
Like flaws in summer laying lusty corn:
For Enid, all abashed she knew not why,
Dared not to glance at her good mother's face,
But silently, in all obedience,
Her mother silent too, nor helping her,
Laid from her limbs the costly-broidered gift,
And robed them in her ancient suit again,
And so descended. Never man rejoiced
More than Geraint to greet her thus attired ”

“ Come; among the sons of men is one
Welcomer than Alfred Tennyson?" [24]
The following is from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson: [25]
"31st January, 1845. I dined this day with Rogers. We had an interesting party of eight. Moxon, the publisher; Kenny, the dramatic poet; Spedding, Lushington, and Alfred Tennyson, three young men of eminent talent belonging to literary Young England—the latter, Tennyson, being by far the most eminent of the young poets. He is an admirer of Goethe, and I had a long tête-à-tête with him about the great poet. ”

“ The words italicized occur again in "A Fragment," by Alfred Tennyson, printed in the "Gem" in the autumn of 1830:
"Yet endure unscathed
Of changeful cycles, the great Pyramids
Broad based amid the fleeting sands."
The piece called "Midnight" contains a graphic description of the fen country, near which Tennyson was born. There is, we think, sufficient internal evidence to prove it to be his. In the next poem specified, "Time: an Ode," we should also rely upon the general style, full of that immature grandiloquence which characterizes much of Tennyson's boyish work. ”

“ A quick brunette, well-moulded, falcon-eyed,
And on the hither side, or so she look'd,
Of twenty summers. At her left, a child,
In shining draperies, headed like a star,
Her maiden babe, a double April old,
Aglaïa slept. We sat: the Lady glanced:
Then Florian, but no livelier than the dame
That whisper'd 'Asses' ears' among the sedge,
'My sister.'⁠'Comely too by all that's fair'
Said Cyril,⁠'O hush, hush!' and she began,
'This world was once a fluid haze of light,
Till toward the centre set the starry tides
And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast
The planets: then the monster, then the man ”

“ The state of utter indigence to which Tennyson was reduced greatly exercised his friends, and in September 1845, at the suggestion of Henry Hallam, Sir Robert Peel was induced to bestow on the poet a pension of £200 a year. Never was public money expended in a more patriotic fashion. Tennyson's health slowly became restored, and in 1846 he was hard at work on The Princess; in the autumn of this year he took a tour in Switzerland, and saw great mountains and such "stateliest bits of landskip" for the first time. ”

“ Poetry of the very highest order, coupled with much affectation, much defective writing, many wilful blunders, renders Alfred Tennyson a very worthy and a very difficult subject for the critic. The extreme diversity and unequal merit of his compositions, make it a very perplexing business to form any general estimate of his writings. The conclusion the critic comes to at one moment he discards the next. He finds it impossible to satisfy himself, nor can ever quite determine in what measure praise and censure should be mixed. ”

“ One morning when my father was on the way to his studio, he met his landlord who had a big grocer’s shop and they had this conversation: “will you tell me, sir, if you think Tennyson should have been given that peerage?” “one’s only doubt is if he should have accepted it: it was a finer thing to be Alfred Tennyson.” ”

“ To your good damsel there who sits apart,
And seems so lonely?' 'My free leave,' he said;
'Get her to speak: she doth not speak to me.'
Then rose Limours, and looking at his feet,
Like him who tries the bridge he fears may fail,
Crost and came near, lifted adoring eyes,
Bowed at her side and uttered whisperingly:
'Enid, the pilot star of my lone life,
Enid, my early and my only love,
Enid, the loss of whom hath turned me wild--
What chance is this? how is it I see you here?
Ye are in my power at last, are in my power. ”

“ He has none of the gorgeousness of Ruskin or the titanic strength of Carlyle, but he can be finely eloquent, and he is certainly one of the masters of polished effectiveness.
ALFRED TENNYSON. In poetry, apart from the drama, the Victorian period is the greatest in English literature. Its most representative, though not its greatest, poet is Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson, the fourth of a large family of children, was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809. That year, as it happened, is distinguished by the birth of a large number of eminent men, among them Gladstone, Darwin, and Lincoln. ”

“ A little space was left between the horns, Through which I clambered o'er at top with pain, Dropt on the sward, and up the linden walks, And, tost on thoughts that changed from hue to hue, Now poring on the glowworm, now the star, I paced the terrace, till the Bear had wheeled Through a great arc his seven slow suns. A step Of lightest echo, then a loftier form Than female, moving through the uncertain gloom, Disturbed me with the doubt 'if this were she,' But it was Florian. 'Hist O Hist,' he said, 'They seek us: out so late is out of rules. Moreover "seize the strangers" is the cry. ”

“ The king scorned you so he sent some one from his kitchen."
"Come Daughters of the Dawn and arm me!" cried Sir Morning-star, and three bare-footed, bare-headed maidens in pink and gold dresses brought him a blue coat of mail and a blue shield.
"A kitchen knave in scorn of me!" roared the blue knight. "I won't fight him. Go home, knave! It isn't proper for you to be riding abroad with a lady."
"Dog, you lie! I'm sprung from nobler lineage than you," and saying this, Gareth sprang fiercely at his adversary who met him in the middle of the bridge. ”

“ Your oath is brokon: we dismiss you: go.
For this lost lamb (she pointed to the child)
Our mind is changed: we assume it to ourselves.'
Thereat the Lady stretch'd a vulture throat
And shot from crooked lips a haggard smile.
'The plan was mine. I built the nest' she said
'To hatch the cuckoo. Rise!' and stoop'd to updrag
Melissa: she, half on her mother propt,
Half-drooping from her, turn'd her face, and cast
A liquid look on Ida, full of prayer,
Which melted Florian's fancy as she hung,
A Niobëan daughter, one arm out,
Appealing to the bolts of Heaven ”

“ Look at him— The rosy face, and long down-silvering beard, The brows unwrinkled as a summer mere.— STIGAND. A summer mere with sudden wreckful gusts From a side-gorge. Passionless? How he flamed When Tostig's anger'd earldom flung him, nay, He fain had calcined all Northumbria To one black ash, but that thy patriot passion Siding with our great Council against Tostig, Out-passion'd his! Holy? ay, ay, forsooth, A conscience for his own soul, not his realm; A twilight conscience lighted thro' a chink; Thine by the sun ”

“ With that wild wheel we go not up or down;
Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great."
"The song of that little bird describes the nest she lives in," cried Earl Yniol approaching. "Enter."
Geraint alighted from his charger and stepped within the large dusky cobwebbed hall, where an aged lady sat, with Enid moving about her, like a little flower in a wilted sheath of a faded silk gown. [Pg 54]
"Enid, the good knight's horse is standing in the court," cried the earl. "Take him to the stall and give him some corn, then go to town and buy us some meat and wine." ”

“ Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain
And labour. Each was like a Druid rock;
Or like a spire of land that stands apart
Cleft from the main, and clang'd about with mews.
Then, as we came, the crowd dividing clove
An advent to the throne; and therebeside,
Half-naked as if caught at once from bed,
And tumbled on the purple footcloth, lay
The lily-shining child; and on the left,
Bow'd on her palms and folded up from wrong,
Her round white shoulder shaken with her sobs,
Melissa knelt; but Lady Blanche erect
Stood up and spake, an affluent orator. ”

“ In 'Dora,' 'Locksley Hall,' 'The Two Voices,' 'Morte d'Arthur,' I find my own life, much of it, written truly out." [14]
No great reputation, however, has been without its assailants little spirits who do their best or worst to undermine the fame they can never hope themselves to reach, and Alfred Tennyson was not more fortunate than the rest. ”

“ Tennyson kept visiting London, where he saw Thackeray and the despair of Carlyle, and at Bath House he was too modest to be introduced to the great Duke whose requiem he was to sing so nobly. Oddly enough Douglas Jerrold enthusiastically assured Tennyson, at a dinner of a Society of Authors, that “you are the one who will live.” ”

“ His is the tranquil, fruitful old age that crowns a well ordered career.
[Pg 22]
MISTAKES CONCERNING TENNYSON. A STUDY IN CONTEMPORANEOUS BIOGRAPHY.
“Alfred Tennyson was born August 5, 1809, at Somersby, a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, of which, and of a neighboring parish, his father, Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, was rector. The poet’s mother was Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche, vicar of Louth. Alfred was the third of seven sons—Frederick, Charles, Alfred, Edward, Horatio, Arthur, and Septimus. ”

“ He shrank and howl'd, and from his brow drew back
His hand to push me from him; and the face,
The very face and form of Lionel
Flash'd thro' my eyes into my innermost brain,
And at his feet I seemed to faint and fall,
To fall and die away. I could not rise
Albeit I strove to follow. They past on,
The lordly Phantasms! in their floating folds
They past and were no more: but I had fallen
Prone by the dashing runnel on the grass.
Alway the inaudible invisible thought
Artificer and subject, lord and slave,
Shaped by the audible and visible,
Moulded the audible and visible ”

“ The narrow street that clamber’d toward the mill.
Then, on a golden autumn eventide,
The younger people making holiday,
With bag and sack and basket, great and small,
Went nutting to the hazels. Philip stay’d
(His father lying sick and needing him)
An hour behind; but as he climb’d the hill,
Just where the prone edge of the wood began
To feather toward the hollow, saw the pair,
Enoch and Annie, sitting hand-in-hand,
His large gray eyes and weather-beaten face
All-kindled by a still and sacred fire,
That burn’d as on an altar. Philip look’d,
And in their eyes and faces read his doom ”