IV. He heard the thunders of Almighty Will He heard the echoes answering, answering still A high song pouring from the choirs Of giant seraphs ranked around, Like pyramidal fires with skies of azure crowned. But when the anthem died he made his mighty suit. All Heaven was hushed at his bold word, His fervent voice was heard Ascending to the Secret Place. He paused a wave of smiles came floating down, Who WAST and ART and ever more shalt BE!" Again his wings unfurled V. Like snowy clouds around a star, Beyond the Inner World. At last he checked his eager flight There lighting on a promontory, And over the cloudy Deep He stretched his shining hands: And still the INFLUENCE grew in might, Now quick, now slow, Went smiting all the Chaos to and fro, Until its dull eyes opened lazily to the glow. He spoke ! The darkness shuddering broke: Then the sun-orb, from a chasm, moaning in the troubled ocean, Rose and towered grandly upward, with a slow melodious motion; Solemn Saturn with his bright rings wheeling round his stately form, When ye first, with low, sweet laughter, in your azure circles whirled. VI. But still the INFLUENCE brooding hung O'er all the spheres and peopled all their climes : First to the lower atoms clung; But took the nobler in the nobler times. It swept along with permeating song, In whose harmonious breath An Eden kissed to life the cold, black lips of Death. The snow-white swan went sweetly murmuring, VII. And still the Influence swept along, And still diviner grew the song. The wild bee murmured in the flower; the wild bird sang aloud; 1815. W. W. A TALK ABOUT THE PRINCESS. CARL BENSON'S LIBRARY. Present: CARL AND FRED PETERS. PETERS. And so Carl, while I have been | in the thickest of the stirring times abroad, and seen one monarchy topple after another, you have been quietly reading at home. And that gray-covered book is poetry of course.* BENSON. It is TENNYSON'S PRINCESS. PETERS. Oh, Tennyson! Yes, I reYes, I remember you always had a great admiration for him-not but what he is justly entitled to a good standing among the secondary poets. BENSON. Perhaps you would be surprised to hear Tennyson spoken of as a greater poet than Byron. PETERS. Ay, that should I. BENSON. And yet such is at present the opinion of a very large number of the best educated men in England. PETERS. Indeed! I knew that of late years Wordsworth had become the fashionable poet of his literary countrymen, but did not suspect that they had now set up a new idol in his place. BENSON. The process is natural enough. Men grow sated with passion and excitement; they rush for relief to quiet meditation. The popular taste passes from poetry which defies theory and morality to poetry which is all theory and morality. În time the proper medium between and union of the two begins to be seen and appreciated. The literary world has its oscillations of this sort as well as the political. PETERS. This then you are disposed to consider Tennyson's great merit, that he is a uniter and harmonizer of the two opposite schools, the Byronic and the Wordsworthian? BENSON. I am, though well aware it is not the ground that most of his admirers would take. They would make him (so far as they would allow him to have any master) a follower of Wordsworth. But the passionate element is certainly very predominant in him at times, sufficiently so to have annoyed some over-proper people here. And I do consider this fusion or eclecticism, or whatever you choose to call it, as one mark of a great poet, because it gives a truer representation of man than is afforded by either of the schools which it combines. The slave of passion, on however grand a scale he may be depicted, is a low development of our nature. The medita tive philosopher is a high, but an incomplete development. You would not choose as your type of government an unbridled democracy or an immovable conservatism. but one in which the two parties had roen and scope to struggle. So in the man. you wish to see the play of his feelings and the supervision of his judgment, his bette reason prevailing in the end amid the cer flict of his passions, but only "saving li as by fire." And where in modern poetry will you find a greater example of this the in Locksley Hall? PETERS. What is the reason then that some people complain of Tennyson's wi ting namby-pamby, and emasculating p etry? BENSON. Simply because some peop are dummies. I can understand a char of this kind as applied to Mrs. Hemans, t Keats, or Wordsworth, (not meaning the I should agree with the man who ma the charge, but I can see why he makes but as applied to Tennyson it seems to neither more nor less than absurd. Ther is pathos and sentiment in him: there passages which may make those cry w are cryingly disposed. In the name Apollo and the nine Muses, is that to be s down to his discredit? Read Locksley H I say again, and read Morte d'Arthur, and | then tell me that the man who wrote them has emasculated poetry. Bulwer and Mrs. Norton, whichever it was of them that perpetrated the New Timon, might write their heads off before they could achieve two poems that will live alongside of those. Ought a man never to feel pensive? Is it a crime to be sometimes moved by the pathetic? I well remember that I used to lie on a green bank of summer mornings and read Theocritus till I was full of pity for Daphnis and the unfortunate man who "had a cruel companion;" but I never found that it unfitted me for taking a horse across country or digging up hard words out of a big lexicon at the proper time. PETERS. Yes, I remember Romano and you lying on that very bank you are thinking of, between the Trinity bridge and the Trinity library, and him making his confession thus: "I acknowledge the influence of the scene. At this moment any one might do me." BENSON. There was a man of the world who was not ashamed to be sentimental, and why should a poet be? PETERS. Thus far you have praised Tennyson's taste and judgment rather than his genius and originality, it seems to me. What peculiar and individual merits do you find in his poetry? BENSON. In the first place, wonderful harmony of verse; in the second PETERS. Wait a moment, and let us dispose of the first place before going further. It really surprises me to hear you make such a point of Tennyson's harmony, for he is frequently blamed on this very head. There are some violent, old-fashioned elisions, to which he is over-prone BENSON. Such as "i' the" for "in thee." PETERS. Exactly; and though not professing to have read his poems critically, I would engage to point you out a number of lines in them which contain weak or superfluous syllables. BENSON. It must be confessed that occasional blemishes of the sort may be detected in him, yet it is scarce possible to read one of his poems carefully through without being struck with his exquisite sense of melody. Try it especially with his blank verse :-blank verse, as every judge of verse knows, is a much greater trial of an author's powers of versification than any rhyming metre. Read Enone or Morte d'Arthur, and you will see what I mean. PETERS. But after all, allowing what you claim, is not this a small matter to build a poetic reputation on? You may have mere nonsense verses, like the " Song by a Person of Quality," perfect in the way of rhythm and metre: indeed it is a very common device of small poets to make sound supply the place of sense. BENSON. It is also a very common device of people who are not poets at all to profess themselves such geniuses that they can despise the ordinary laws of versification. An every-day trick that, and a sad nuisance are these little great men who set up to write poetry without being able to write verse. Is the most correct and elegant prose translation of a passage from Homer or Dante poetry? The question seems almost absurd; but why isn't it poetry? There are all the ideas of the original. It is the vehicle of them that makes the essential difference. And any tangible and practicable definition of poetry must somehow include metrical expression; if you admit one independent of this element, you may be driven to allow that the Vicar of Wakefield is a poem, to which felicitous conclusion I once pushed a transcendentalist who was arguing the point with me. PETERS. But metrical excellence is, to a certain extent at least, a matter of study and practice. BENSON. What then? PETERS. Why, you know, poetaBENSON. Nascitur to be sure. Which means that unless a man has a genius for poetry he can never be made a poet. And the very same thing is true of the painter or the mathematician. A man requires education for everything, even for the proper development of his physical powers. PETERS. Of course you except political wisdom and statesmanship, which in a democracy come to every man by nature, like Dogberry's reading and writing. BENSON. Of course. But no man can afford to despise the rudiments of art, I don't care what his natural genius is. What would you say to a young painter who should refuse to study anatomy and perspective? PETERS. Then you think it as necessary for a poet in posse to study metre, as for a painter in posse to study anatomy? BENSON. Rem acu. PETERS. You were going to mention another excellence of Tennyson. BENSON. Yes, his felicity of epithet. You may go through his two volumes without finding a single otiose adjective. Now it is the happy employment of adjectives that especially makes descriptive writing, whether in prose or poetry, picturesque ; and therefore in Idylls—ἐιδύλλια—poems which are little pictures, or each a series of pictures, Tennyson has no equal since his master in that branch of poetry, Theocritus. PETERS. You seem to have studied your man well, and therein you would have the advantage of me in a discussion. But let me ask you one question. Do you honestly think, to say nothing of this country, that Tennyson will ever have the same continental reputation that Byron has? PETERS. Yes, I recollect; and how she gazes down from her isle-altar, and turns to scorn with lips divine the falsehood of extremes. There is nothing violently or offensively national in that. BENSON. He began with a great deal more spice. In one of his earlier volumes there is a sort of war-song conceived in a spirit of magnificent national conceit. It starts with this satisfactory assumption :— "There is no land like England Where'er the light of day be; And there is a pious and benevolent re- Through the water and the fire." BENSON. I do not for a very good reason. After all, I like a man to stand up for Tennyson is decidedly a more national poet his country. We don't do it half enough. than Byron. Indeed, there is nothing na- PETERS. Whom do you mean by we? tional in the latter. There is nothing in BENSON. You and I, Whigs and Locos, him that a Frenchman or an American and everybody. But to return to our cannot appreciate as well as an English- Tennyson. There is another reason for his man; nay, there are many things which a being "caviare to the general,” even i Frenchman can appreciate better than an his own country. His mind is classical:r Englishman, because they are more in ac-moulded, and his poems full of classical cordance with his feelings and sympathies. Whereas PETERS. You must make an exception in favor of Byron's satires on contemporary English poets. BENSON. To be sure; but they are certainly not the poems on which his continental reputation in any way depends. Tennyson, on the other hand, is eminently an English poet. He likes to take his subjects from English country life, or English popular stories; and some of his shorter poems are simply and distinctly patriotic, embodying the liberal conservatism of an enlightened English patriotism. PETERS. I remember one beginning "Love thou thy land with love far brought From out the storied Past." allusions. The influence of Homer and Theocritus especially is constntly traceabl in his writings; and his felicitous imitatie and suggestive passages constitute one of his greatest charms to the liberally edu cated. Sometimes he is harsh, if not unitelligible to the uninitiated, as when he says that Sir Bedivere stood with Excalibur, "This way and that dividing the swift uvind In act to throw ;" which reads very stiff till you recollees the Homeric διχθάδι'. δαιρόμενος κατὰ θυμὸν PETERS. I would go further yet, and s that a man, to appreciate Tennyson full must be artistically educated and be famil BENSON. There is a finer one than that: iar with Claudes, and Raphaels, and Titian Of old sat Freedom on the heights, That was what struck me some time ag on reading his Palace of Art, (at the ne ommendation of an admirer, who conside ed it his chef d'œuvre,) and your last re |