"Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is," Shelley says. I
am convinced that we scarcely know how great a poet Lord Tennyson is; use
has made him too familiar. The same hand has "raised the Table Round
again," that has written the sacred book of friendship, that has lulled
us with the magic of the "Lotus Eaters," and the melody of "Tithonus." He
has made us move, like his own Prince--
"Among a world of ghosts,
And feel ourselves the shadows of a dream."
He has enriched our world with conquests of romance; he has recut and
reset a thousand ancient gems of Greece and Rome; he has roused our
patriotism; he has stirred our pity; there is hardly a human passion but
he has purged it and ennobled it, including "this of love." Truly, the
Laureate remains the most various, the sweetest, the most exquisite, the
most learned, the most Virgilian of all English poets, and we may pity
the lovers of poetry who died before Tennyson came.
Here may end the desultory tale of a desultory bookish boyhood. It was
not in nature that one should not begin to rhyme for one's self. But
those exercises were seldom even written down; they lived a little while
in a memory which has lost them long ago. I do remember me that I tried
some of my attempts on my dear mother, who said much what Dryden said to
"Cousin Swift," "You will never be a poet," a decision in which I
straightway acquiesced.
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