Chapter 16

'A long drawn carol, mournful, holy, She chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her eyes were darkened _wholly_, And her smooth face sharpened _slowly_, Turned to towered Camelot. For ere she reached upon the tide The first house on the water side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott! Knight and burgher, lord and dame, To the planked wharfage came; Below _the stern_ they read her name, The Lady of Shalott.'--p. 19.

We pass by two--what shall we call them?--tales, or odes, or sketches, entitled 'Mariana in the South' and 'Eleaenore,' of which we fear we could make no intelligible extract, so curiously are they run together into one dreamy tissue--to a little novel in rhyme, called 'The Miller's Daughter.' Millers' daughters, poor things, have been so generally betrayed by their sweethearts, that it is refreshing to find that Mr. Tennyson has united himself to _his_ miller's daughter in lawful wedlock, and the poem is a history of his courtship and wedding. He begins with a sketch of his own birth, parentage, and personal appearance--

'My father's mansion, mounted high, Looked down upon the village-spire; I was a long and listless boy, And son and heir unto the Squire.'

But the son and heir of Squire Tennyson often descended from the 'mansion mounted high;' and

'I met in all the close green ways, While walking with my line and rod,'

A metonymy for 'rod and line'--

'The wealthy miller's mealy face, Like the _moon in an ivytod_.

'He looked so jolly and so good-- While fishing in the mill-dam water, I laughed to see him as he stood, And dreamt not of the miller's daughter.'--p. 33.

He, however, soon saw, and, need we add, loved the miller's daughter, whose countenance, we presume, bore no great resemblance either to the 'mealy face' of the miller, or 'the moon in an ivy-tod;' and we think our readers will be delighted at the way in which the impassioned husband relates to his wife how his fancy mingled enthusiasm for rural sights and sounds, with a prospect of the less romantic scene of her father's occupation.

'How dear to me in youth, my love, Was everything about the mill; The black, the silent pool above, The pool beneath that ne'er stood still;

The meal-sacks on the whitened floor, The dark round of the dripping wheel, _The very air about the door, Made misty with the floating meal!_'--p. 36.

The accumulation of tender images in the following lines appears not less wonderful:--

'Remember you that pleasant day When, after roving in the woods, ('Twas April then) I came and lay Beneath those _gummy_ chestnut-buds?

'A water-rat from off the bank Plunged in the stream. With idle care, Downlooking through the sedges rank, I saw your troubled image there.

'If you remember, you had set, Upon the narrow casement-edge, A _long green box_ of mignonette And you were leaning on the ledge.'

The poet's truth to Nature in his 'gummy' chestnut-buds, and to Art in the 'long green box' of mignonette--and that masterful touch of likening the first intrusion of love into the virgin bosom of the Miller's daughter to the plunging of a water-rat into the mill-dam--these are beauties which, we do not fear to say, equal anything even in Keats.

We pass by several songs, sonnets, and small pieces, all of singular merit, to arrive at a class, we may call them, of three poems derived from mythological sources--Oenone, the Hesperides, and the Lotos-eaters. But though the subjects are derived from classical antiquity, Mr. Tennyson treats them with so much originality that he makes them exclusively his own. Oenone, deserted by

'Beautiful Paris, evilhearted Paris,'

sings a kind of dying soliloquy addressed to Mount Ida, in a formula which is _sixteen_ times repeated in this short poem.

'Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.'

She tells her 'dear mother Ida,' that when evilhearted Paris was about to judge between the three goddesses, he hid her (Oenone) behind a rock, whence she had a full view of the _naked_ beauties of the rivals, which broke her heart.

'_Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die_:-- It was the deep mid noon: one silvery cloud Had _lost his way_ among the pined hills: They came--_all three_--the Olympian goddesses. Naked they came--

* * * * * *

How beautiful they were! too beautiful To look upon; but Paris was to me _More lovelier_ than all the world beside. _O mother Ida, hearken ere I die._'--p. 56.

In the place where we have indicated a pause, follows a description, long, rich, and luscious--Of the three naked goddesses? Fye for shame--no--of the 'lily flower violet-eyed,' and the 'singing pine,' and the 'overwandering ivy and vine,' and 'festoons,' and 'gnarled boughs,' and 'tree tops,' and 'berries,' and 'flowers,' and all the _inanimate_ beauties of the scene. It would be unjust to the _ingenuus pudor_ of the author not to observe the art with which he has veiled this ticklish interview behind such luxuriant trellis-work, and it is obvious that it is for our special sakes he has entered into these local details, because if there was one thing which 'mother Ida' knew better than another, it must have been her own bushes and brakes. We then have in detail the tempting speeches of, first--

'The imperial Olympian, With arched eyebrow smiling sovranly, Full-eyed Here;'

secondly of Pallas--

'Her clear and bared limbs O'er-thwarted with the brazen-headed spear,'

and thirdly--

'Idalian Aphrodite ocean-born, Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian _wells_--'

for one dip, or even three dips in one well, would not have been enough on such an occasion--and her succinct and prevailing promise of--

'The fairest and most loving _wife_ in Greece;'--

upon evil-hearted Paris's catching at which prize, the tender and chaste Oenone exclaims her indignation, that she herself should not be considered fair enough, since only yesterday her charms had struck awe into--

'A wild and wanton pard, Eyed like the evening-star, with playful tail--'

and proceeds in this anti-Martineau rapture--

'_Most_ loving is _she_?' 'Ah me! my mountain shepherd, that my arms Were wound about thee, and my hot lips prest Close--close to thine in that quick-falling dew Of _fruitful_ kisses ... Dear mother Ida! hearken ere I die!--p. 62.

After such reiterated assurances that she was about to die on the spot, it appears that Oenone thought better of it, and the poem concludes with her taking the wiser course of going to town to consult her swain's sister, Cassandra--whose advice, we presume, prevailed upon her to live, as we can, from other sources, assure our readers she did to a good old age.

In the 'Hesperides' our author, with great judgment, rejects the common fable, which attributes to Hercules the slaying of the dragon and the plunder of the golden fruit. Nay, he supposes them to have existed to a comparatively recent period--namely, the voyage of Hanno, on the coarse canvas of whose log-book Mr. Tennyson has judiciously embroidered the Hesperian romance. The poem opens with a geographical description of the neighbourhood, which must be very clear and satisfactory to the English reader; indeed, it leaves far behind in accuracy of topography and melody of rhythm the heroics of Dionysius _Periegetes_.

'The north wind fall'n, in the new-starred night.'

Here we must pause to observe a new species of _metabole_ with which Mr. Tennyson has enriched our language. He suppresses the E in _fallen_, where it is usually written and where it must be pronounced, and transfers it to the word _new-starred_, where it would not be pronounced if he did not take due care to superfix a _grave_ accent. This use of the grave accent is, as our readers may have already perceived, so habitual with Mr. Tennyson, and is so obvious an improvement, that we really wonder how the language has hitherto done without it. We are tempted to suggest, that if analogy to the accented languages is to be thought of, it is rather the acute ([']) than the grave ([`]) which should be employed on such occasions; but we speak with profound diffidence; and as Mr. Tennyson is the inventor of the system, we shall bow with respect to whatever his final determination may be.

'The north wind fall'n, in the new-starred night Zidonian Hanno, voyaging beyond The hoary promontory of Soloe, Past Thymiaterion in calmed bays.'

We must here note specially the musical flow of this last line, which is the more creditable to Mr. Tennyson, because it was before the tuneless names of this very neighbourhood that the learned continuator of Dionysius retreated in despair--

----[Greek: eponymias nyn ellachen allas Aithiopon gain, dysphonous oud' epierons Mousais ouneka tasd' ego ouk agoreusom' apasas.]

but Mr. Tennyson is bolder and happier--

'Past Thymiaterion in calmed bays, Between the southern and the western Horn, Heard neither'--

We pause for a moment to consider what a sea-captain might have expected to hear, by night, in the Atlantic ocean--he heard

--'neither the warbling of the _nightingale_ Nor melody o' the Libyan lotusflute,'

but he did hear the three daughters of Hesper singing the following song:--

'The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit, Guard it well, guard it warily, Singing airily, Standing about the charmed root, Round about all is mute'--

_mute_, though they sung so loud as to be heard some leagues out at sea--

----'all is mute As the snow-field on mountain peaks, As the sand-field at the mountain foot. Crocodiles in briny creeks Sleep, and stir not: all is mute.'

How admirably do these lines describe the peculiarities of this charmed neighbourhood--fields of snow, so talkative when they happen to lie at the foot of the mountain, are quite out of breath when they get to the top, and the sand, so noisy on the summit of a hill, is dumb at its foot. The very crocodiles, too, are _mute_--not dumb but _mute_. The 'red-combed dragon curl'd' is next introduced--

'Look to him, father, lest he wink, and the golden apple be stolen away, For his ancient heart is drunk with overwatchings night and day, Sing away, sing aloud evermore, in the wind, without stop.'

The north wind, it appears, has by this time awaked again--

'Lest his scaled eyelid drop, For he is older than the world'--

older than the _hills_, besides not rhyming to 'curl'd,' would hardly have been a sufficiently venerable phrase for this most harmonious of lyrics. It proceeds--

'If ye sing not, if ye make false measure, We shall lose eternal pleasure, Worth eternal want of rest. Laugh not loudly: watch the treasure Of the wisdom of the west. In _a corner_ wisdom whispers. Five and three (_Let it not be preached abroad_) make an awful mystery.'--p. 102.

This recipe for keeping a secret, by singing it so loud as to be heard for miles, is almost the only point, in all Mr. Tennyson's poems, in which we can trace the remotest approach to anything like what other men have written, but it certainly does remind us of the 'chorus of conspirators' in the Rovers.

Hanno, however, who understood no language but Punic--(the Hesperides sang, we presume, either in Greek or in English)--appears to have kept on his way without taking any notice of the song, for the poem concludes,--

'The apple of gold hangs over the sea, Five links, a gold chain, are we, Hesper, the Dragon, and sisters three; Daughters three, Bound about All around about The gnarled bole of the charmed tree, The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit, Guard it well, guard it warily, Watch it warily, Singing airily Standing about the charmed root.'--p. 107.

We hardly think that, if Hanno had translated it into Punic, the song would have been more intelligible.

The 'Lotuseaters'--a kind of classical opium-eaters--are Ulysses and his crew. They land on the 'charmed island,' and 'eat of the charmed root,' and then they sing--

'Long enough the winedark wave our weary bark did carry. This is lovelier and sweeter, Men of Ithaca, this is meeter, In the hollow rosy vale to tarry, Like a dreamy Lotuseater--a delicious Lotuseater! We will eat the Lotus, sweet As the yellow honeycomb; In the valley some, and some On the ancient heights divine, And no more roam, On the loud hoar foam, To the melancholy home, At the limits of the brine, The little isle of Ithaca, beneath the day's decline.'--p. 116.

Our readers will, we think, agree that this is admirably characteristic, and that the singers of this song must have made pretty free with the intoxicating fruit. How they got home you must read in Homer:--Mr. Tennyson--himself, we presume, a dreamy lotus-eater, a delicious lotus-eater--leaves them in full song.

Next comes another class of poems,--Visions. The first is the 'Palace of Art,' or a fine house, in which the poet _dreams_ that he sees a very fine collection of well-known pictures. An ordinary versifier would, no doubt, have followed the old routine, and dully described himself as walking into the Louvre, or Buckingham Palace, and there seeing certain masterpieces of painting:--a true poet dreams it. We have not room to hang many of these _chefs-d'oeuvre_, but for a few we must find space.--'The Madonna'--

'The maid mother by a crucifix, In yellow pastures sunny warm, Beneath branch work of costly sardonyx Sat smiling--_babe in arm_.'--p. 72.

The use of the latter, apparently, colloquial phrase is a deep stroke of art. The form of expression is always used to express an habitual and characteristic action. A knight is described '_lance in rest_'--a dragoon, '_sword in hand_'--so, as the idea of the Virgin is inseparably connected with her child, Mr. Tennyson reverently describes her conventional position--'_babe in arm_.'

His gallery of illustrious portraits is thus admirably arranged:--The Madonna--Ganymede--St. Cecilia--Europa--Deep-haired Milton--Shakspeare--Grim Dante--Michael Angelo--Luther--Lord Bacon--Cervantes--Calderon--King David--'the Halicarnassean' (_quaere_, which of them?)--Alfred, (not Alfred Tennyson, though no doubt in any other man's gallery _he_ would have a place) and finally--

'Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, Swarth Moses by the Coptic sea, Plato, _Petrarca_, Livy, and Raphael, And eastern Confutzee!'

We can hardly suspect the very original mind of Mr. Tennyson to have harboured any recollections of that celebrated Doric idyll, 'The groves of Blarney,' but certainly there is a strong likeness between Mr. Tennyson's list of pictures and the Blarney collection of statutes--

'Statues growing that noble place in, All heathen goddesses most rare, Homer, Plutarch, and Nebuchadnezzar, All standing naked in the open air!'

In this poem we first observed a stroke of art (repeated afterwards) which we think very ingenious. No one who has ever written verse but must have felt the pain of erasing some happy line, some striking stanza, which, however excellent in itself, did not exactly suit the place for which it was destined. How curiously does an author mould and remould the plastic verse in order to fit in the favourite thought; and when he finds that he cannot introduce it, as Corporal Trim says, _any how_, with what reluctance does he at last reject the intractable, but still cherished offspring of his brain! Mr. Tennyson manages this delicate matter in a new and better way; he says, with great candour and simplicity, 'If this poem were not already too long, _I should have added_ the following stanzas,' and _then he adds them_, (p. 84;)--or, 'the following lines are manifestly superfluous, as a part of the text, but they may be allowed to stand as a separate poem,' (p. 121,) _which they do_;--or, 'I intended to have added something on statuary, but I found it very difficult;'--(he had, moreover, as we have seen, been anticipated in this line by the Blarney poet)--'but I have finished the statues of _Elijah_ and _Olympias_--judge whether I have succeeded,' (p. 73)--and then we have these two statues. This is certainly the most ingenious device that has ever come under our observation, for reconciling the rigour of criticism with the indulgence of parental partiality. It is economical too, and to the reader profitable, as by these means

'We lose no drop of the immortal man.'

The other vision is 'A Dream of Fair Women,' in which the heroines of all ages--some, indeed, that belong to the times of 'heathen goddesses most rare'--pass before his view. We have not time to notice them all, but the second, whom we take to be Iphigenia, touches the heart with a stroke of nature more powerful than even the veil that the Grecian painter threw over the head of her father.

----'dimly I could descry The stern blackbearded kings with wolfish eyes, Watching to see me die.

The tall masts quivered as they lay afloat; The temples, and the people, and the shore; One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat-- Slowly,--and _nothing more_!'

What touching simplicity--what pathetic resignation--he cut my throat--'_nothing more_!' One might indeed ask, 'what _more_' she would have?

But we must hasten on; and to tranquillize the reader's mind after this last affecting scene, shall notice the only two pieces of a lighter strain which the volume affords. The first is elegant and playful; it is a description of the author's study, which he affectionately calls his _Darling Room_.

'O darling room, my heart's delight; Dear room, the apple of my sight; With thy two couches, soft and white, There is no room so exquis_ite_; No little room so warm and bright, Wherein to read, wherein to write.'

We entreat our readers to note how, even in this little trifle, the singular taste and genius of Mr. Tennyson break forth. In such a dear _little_ room a narrow-minded scribbler would have been content with _one_ sofa, and that one he would probably have covered with black mohair, or red cloth, or a good striped chintz; how infinitely more characteristic is white dimity!--'tis as it were a type of the purity of the poet's mind. He proceeds--

'For I the Nonnenwerth have seen, And Oberwinter's vineyards green, Musical Lurlei; and between The hills to Bingen I have been, Bingen in Darmstadt, where the _Rhene_ Curves toward Mentz, a woody scene.

'Yet never did there meet my sight, In any town, to left or right, A little room so exquis_ite_, With _two_ such couches soft and white; Nor any room so warm and bright, Wherein to read, wherein to write.'--p. 153.

A common poet would have said that he had been in London or in Paris--in the loveliest villa on the banks of the Thames, or the most gorgeous chateau on the Loire--that he has reclined in Madame de Stael's boudoir, and mused in Mr. Roger's comfortable study; but the _darling room_ of the poet of nature (which we must suppose to be endued with sensibility, or he would not have addressed it) would not be flattered with such common-place comparisons;--no, no, but it is something to have it said that there is no such room in the ruins of the Drachenfels, in the vineyard of Oberwinter, or even in the rapids of the _Rhene_, under the Lurleyberg. We have ourselves visited all these celebrated spots, and can testify in corroboration of Mr. Tennyson, that we did not see in any of them anything like _this little room so exquis_ITE.

The second of the lighter pieces, and the last with which we shall delight our readers, is a severe retaliation on the editor of the Edinburgh Magazine, who, it seems, had not treated the first volume of Mr. Tennyson with the same respect that we have, we trust, evinced for the second.

'To CHRISTOPHER NORTH. You did late review my lays, Crusty Christopher; You did mingle blame and praise Rusty Christopher.

When I learnt from whom it came I forgave you all the blame, Musty Christopher; I could _not_ forgive the praise, Fusty Christopher.'--p. 153.

Was there ever anything so genteelly turned--so terse--so sharp--and the point so stinging and _so true_?

'I could not forgive the _praise_, Fusty Christopher!'

This leads us to observe on a phenomenon which we have frequently seen, but never been able to explain. It has been occasionally our painful lot to excite the displeasure of authors whom we have reviewed, and who have vented their dissatisfaction, some in prose, some in verse, and some in what we could not distinctly say whether it was verse or prose; but we have invariably found that the common formula of retort was that adopted by Mr. Tennyson against his northern critic, namely, that the author would always

--Forgive us all the _blame_, But could _not_ forgive the _praise_.