Part 2 (1/2)

”You that do profess to teach And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart”

The universities, in fact, teach a good deal of that which can be learned, but the best things cannot be taught The universities give men leisure, books, and companionshi+p, to learn for themselves All tutors cannot be, and at that ti, men like Jowett and T H Green, Garaduates sat with enthusiasm, ”did EAGERLY frequent,” like Omar Khayyam In later years Tennyson found closer relations between dons and undergraduates, and recorded his affection for his university She had supplied him with such companionshi+p as is rare, and per terms,” even if tutors and lecturers were creatures of routine, terriblement enfonces dans la matiere, like the sire of Madelon and Cathos, that honourable citizen

Tennyson just e The old enthusiast of revolution was justifying passive obedience: thirty years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost Jacobite Such is the triumph of time In the summer of 1830 Tennyson, with Hallam, visited the Pyrenees The purpose was political--to aid some Spanish rebels The fruit is seen in OEnone and Mariana in the South

In March 1831 Tennyson lost his father ”He slept in the dead host cainative people;”

a reination”

Whatever causes these phantasms, it is not the kind of phantasia which is consciously exercised by the poet Coleridge had seen far too e and Donne apart, with the hallucinations of Goethe and Shelley, who host”? One who saw Tennyson as he wandered alone at this period called hih above othera power of intercourse with the spirit world not granted to others” But it was the world of the poet, not of the ”e for six years But, anticipating their removal, Arthur Hallam in 1831 dealt in prophecy about the identification in the district of places in his friend's poes of the brook,”

as,--in fact, critic after critic has done Tennyson disliked--these ”localisers” The poet's walks were shared by Arthur Hallam, then affianced to his sister Emily

CHAPTER II--POEMS OF 1831-1833

By 1832in MS aing Perhaps bards of to-day do not find an eagerness a their acquaintance for effusions in manuscript, or in proof- sheets The charmed volume appeared at the end of the year (dated 1833), and Hallam denounced as ”infamous” Lockhart's review in the Quarterly Infa How Lockhart could reat and abundant poetry remains a marvel Ten years later the Scorpion repented, and invited Sterling to review any book he pleased, for the purpose of enabling hiladly Lockhart hated all affectation and ”preciosity,” of which the new book was not destitute He had been a Wordsworth's most ardent admirers when Wordsworth had few, but theto hiave hiht that the poet was a member of a London clique There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except that he DID repent, that , and that, above all, his censures were accepted by the poet, who altered, later, es of a fine absurdity criticised by the infareat prose-writers, historians, who never altered the wondrous errors to which their attention was called by critics Prose-writers have beenblunders in verifiable facts than was this very sensitive poet to his occasional lapses in taste

The Lady of Shalott, even in its early forive assurance of a poet In effect it is even more poetical, in a mysterious way, if infinitely less huend in Elaine It has the charory of the fatal escape from the world of dreams and shadows into that of realitiespoet, aware that he was ”living in phantasy” The alterations are usually for the better The daffodil is not an aquatic plant, as the poet seems to assert in the first forreen sheathed daffodilly, Tremble in the water chilly, Round about Shalott”

nobody can prefer to keep

”Though the squally east wind keenly Bleith folded arms serenely By the water stood the queenly Lady of Shalott”

However stoical the Lady may have been, the reader is too seriously sympathetic with her inevitable discomfort -

”All raimented in snohite That loosely flew,”

as she was The original conclusion was distressing; ere dropped from the airs of mysterious romance:-

”They crossed theht, uest; There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest The well-fed wits at Camelot”

Hitherto we have been ”puzzled,” but as with the sublime incoherences of a dream Noe meet well-fed wits, who say, ”Bless my stars!” as perhaps we should also have done in the circu, in a very cold east wind, alone in a boat, for ”her blood was frozen slowly,” as was natural, granting the weather and the lady's airy costu poet's vision broke up in this hu that the Scorpion, finding suchman, was more sensitive to the absurdity than to the romance But no lover of poetry should have been blind to the almost flawless excellence of Mariana in the South, inspired by the landscape of the Provencal tour with Arthur Hallam