Part 2 (2/2)

In consequence of Lockhart's censures, or in deference to the reatly altered before 1842 It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of Tennyson's dolish idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture The seventh stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to bring in ”, and where ”trout” would best recall an English chalk strea trout, which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as the ”reflex of a beauteous forel at the water-side,” said ”that good old angler, noith God,” Tho and listless boy” found it to be It is no wonder that the ht to yield consent to my desire” The domestic affections, in fact, do not adapt themselves so well to poetry as the passion, unique in Tennyson, of Fatiiarisms will note -

”O Love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul thro'

My lips,”

and will observe Mr Browning's

”Once he kissed My soul out in a fiery mist”

As to OEnone, the scenery of that earliest of the classical idylls is borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallaested by Beattie's Judgment of Paris,” says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which

”Quintus Calaber Somewhat lazily handled of old”

may have reached Tennyson's mind from an older writer than Beattie

He is at least as likely to have been familiar with Greek reatly altered in 1842, contained such unlucky phrases as ”cedar shadowy,” and ”snowycoloured,” ”marblecold,” ”violet-eyed”--easy spoils of criticism The alterations which converted a beautiful but faulty into a beautiful and flawless poenificance of OEnone's ”I will not die alone,” which in the earlier volume directly refers to the foreseen end of all as narrated in Tennyson's late piece, The Death of OEnone The whole poe hues of titian and the famous Homeric lines on the divine wedlock of Zeus and Hera

The allegory or moral of The Palace of Art does not need explanation

Not many of the poems owe more to revision The early stanza about Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, and ”Eastern Confutzee,” did undeniably remind the reader, as Lockhart said, of The Groves of Blarney

”With statues gracing that noble place in, All haythen Goddessesnaked in the open air”

In the early version the Soul, being too as,”

like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford

”Thus her intense, untold delight, In deep or vivid colour, sht”

Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter's experiave hiht,” and his ”infamous revieas biassed by these circu more remarkable than in its proof of the many-sidedness of the author He offered mediaeval romance, and classical perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and domestic idyll, of which The May Queen is probably the ,” conversant with ”the spiritual world,” ht have been expected to disdain topics ithin the range of Eliza Cook He did not despise but elevated thelish public than he could have done by a century of Fatimas or Lotos-Eaters On the other hand, a taste more fastidious, or more perverse, will scarcely be satisfied with pathos which in process of time has come to seem ”obvious” The pathos of early death in the prime of beauty is less obvious in Homer, where Achilles is to be the victiy, where we only know that the dead bride or maiden was fair; but the poor May Queen is of her nature rather coyman, has toldthe Tennysonian parody of Wordsworth -