Alfred Tennyson. Andrew Lang

through the flutes of the Grecians” came first these Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyson’s own Lucretius, then in Mr. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon:—

      “Lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of west

       Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea

       Rolls without wind for ever, and the snow

       There shows not her white wings and windy feet,

       Nor thunder nor swift rain saith anything,

       Nor the sun burns, but all things rest and thrive.”

      So fortunate in their transmission through poets have been the lines of “the Ionian father of the rest,” the greatest of them all.

      In the variety of excellences which marks Tennyson, the new English idylls of 1842 hold their prominent place. Nothing can be more exquisite and more English than the picture of “the garden that I love.” Theocritus cannot be surpassed; but the idyll matches to the seventh of his, where it is most closely followed, and possesses such a picture of a girl as the Sicilian never tried to paint.

      Dora is another idyll, resembling the work of a Wordsworth in a clime softer than that of the Fells. The lays of Edwin Morris and Edward Bull are not among the more enduring of even the playful poems. The St. Simeon Stylites appears “made to the hand” of the author of Men and Women rather than of Tennyson. The grotesque vanity of the anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St. Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet lightly turns to “society verse” lifted up into the air of poetry, in the charm of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches of actual history; and thence to the strength and passion of Love and Duty. Shall

      “Sin itself be found

       The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun?”

      That this is the province of sin is a pretty popular modern moral. But Honour is the better part, and here was a poet who had the courage to say so; though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an age when highly respectable matrons assure us that “passion,” like charity, covers a multitude of sins. Love and Duty, we must admit, is “early Victorian.”

      The Ulysses is almost a rival to the Morte d’Arthur. It is of an early date, after Arthur Hallam’s death, and Thackeray speaks of the poet chanting his

      “Great Achilles whom we knew,”

      as if he thought that this was in Cambridge days. But it is later than these. Tennyson said, “Ulysses was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.” Assuredly the expression is more simple, and more noble, and the personal emotion more dignified for the classic veil. When the plaintive Pessimist (“ ‘proud of the title,’ as the Living Skeleton said when they showed him”) tells us that “not to have been born is best,” we may answer with Ulysses—

      “Life piled on life

       Were all too little.”

      The Ulysses of Tennyson, of course, is Dante’s Ulysses, not Homer’s Odysseus, who brought home to Ithaca not one of his mariners. His last known adventure, the journey to the land of men who knew not the savour of salt, Odysseus was to make on foot and alone; so spake the ghost of Tiresias within the poplar pale of Persephone.

      The Two Voices expresses the contest of doubts and griefs with the spirit of endurance and joy which speaks alone in Ulysses. The man who is unhappy, but does not want to put an end to himself, has certainly the better of the argument with the despairing Voice. The arguments of “that barren Voice” are, indeed, remarkably deficient in cogency and logic, if we can bring ourselves to strip the discussion of its poetry. The original title, Thoughts of a Suicide, was inappropriate. The suicidal suggestions are promptly faced and confuted, and the mood of the author is throughout that of one who thinks life worth living:—

      “Whatever crazy sorrow saith,

       No life that breathes with human breath

       Has ever truly long’d for death.

      ’Tis life whereof our nerves are scant,

       Oh life, not death, for which we pant;

       More life, and fuller, that I want.”