67 CHAPTER V GROUP IV.-ENOCH ARDEN AND OTHER POEMS Enoch Arden bears the same relation to its prototypes, Southey's English Eclogues, as Wordsworth's Michael bears-the connecting link, so to speak, between the English Idylls and this work being Dora. It is interesting to compare Enoch Arden, and particularly the part describing Enoch's return home, with Crabbe's touching story, The Parting Hour. But the framework of a portion, at all events, of the story was evidently suggested by a poem in Miss Adelaide A. Procter's Legends and Lyrics, entitled Homeward Bound. Tennyson has, indeed, often done little more than fill in the sketch given by her. Compare, for example, the passage describing Enoch on the island— The mountain wooded to the peak, &c. As down the shore he ranged, or all day long with the passage in which her hero sits brooding on the shore, over memories of his wife and child :— Gaunt and dreary ran the mountains Up to where the lonely desert 7 In the gorges of the mountains Then I gazed at the great ocean. Nor has he forgotten the touch about the largeness of the stars in a tropical sky : : And the glimmering stars though larger, which appears as Then the great stars that globed themselves in heaven. Compare, too, the return home and the anticipation of again meeting his wife and child :- I would picture my dear cottage, See the crackly firewood burn And the two beside it seated. The journey, too, through the autumn landscape to his cottage, and the picture of Annie with her little family and husband seen in the glow of the ruddy fire -in all this Tennyson simply fills in Miss Procter's sketch: It was evening in late autumn And the gusty wind blew chill, She was seated by the fire, In her arms she held a child. Smiled on him who stood beside her. He had been an ancient comrade; Not a single word we said While we gazed upon each other, He the living, I the dead. The beautiful and pathetic touch about the dead child was also suggested by Miss Procter's poem, so also the angelic character of Enoch: Nothing of farewell I utter'd, Save in broken words to pray That God in His great love would bless her; So, broken-hearted and uncomplaining, in the very sublimity of resignation and self-sacrifice, Miss Procter's hero sets forth and leaves them, consoling himself that the end must come before long: I too shall reach home and rest, Plainly it was on this poem and not on Mrs. Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers' that Enoch Arden was founded. In the details of the poem there are no reminiscences or parallels sufficiently striking to be worth pointing out. The general cast and style of the idyll of The Brook remind us closely of Wordsworth's Brothers. In the charming lyric inserted there are two interesting little parallels, one with Burns's Halloween, and the other with the well-known Italian inscription on a sun-dial. Burns's lines are as charming as Tennyson's : Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays Whyles cookit underneath the braes Below the spreading hazel (Halloween, st. 25). Though, curiously enough, the name of the ship in which Enoch sailed, the Good Fortune, is identical with the name of the ship in which Mrs. Gaskell's mariner makes his voyage. Men may come and men may go Io vado e vengo ogni giorno, Ma tu andrai senza ritorno. In Aylmer's Field the line Pity, the violet on the tyrant's grave is, of course, an allusion to the passage in which Suetonius tells us that there were those who placed flowers on Nero's grave, hated though he was: Et tamen non defuerunt qui per longum tempus vernis æstivisque floribus tumulum ejus ornarent (lib. vi. ad fin.) (Nevertheless there were not wanting people who continued for a long time to deck his grave with flowers of the spring and summer). In Sea Dreams, the lines my poor venture but a fleet of glass Wreck'd on a reef of visionary gold may be compared with Pindar (Fragment 136, edit. Schneidewin) : πελάγει δ' ἐν πολυχρύσοιο πλούτου πάντες ἴσα νέομεν ψευδῆ πρὸς ἀκτάν (And on a sea rich in golden wealth we all alike go sailing towards a beach of delusion)— which is indeed a commentary on the whole passage in Tennyson's poem. A useful and indeed necessary commentary on Lucretius, which stands next, will be a collection of the passages in the De Rerum Naturâ itself, and in the other Greek and Roman classics on which the poet has drawn. The anecdote, sufficiently horrible and repulsive, on which the poem is founded, is to be found in Jerome's additions to the Eusebian Chronicle under the year B.C. 94— Titus Lucretius poeta nascitur; postea amatorio poculo in furorem versus, cum aliquot libellos per intervalla insaniæ conscripsisset, quos postea Cicero emendavit, propriâ se manu interfecit anno ætatis xliii. (Titus Lucretius the poet is born: afterwards when driven mad by a love philtre, and after he had composed, in the intervals of his insanity, several books, which Cicero after. wards revised, he committed suicide in the forty-third year of his age). That the name of the woman who administered the philtre was Lucilia, and that she was the poet's wife, rests, I believe, on the authority of a single sentence ascribed to Seneca, but not to be found in the works of either of the Senecas: Livia virum suum occidit quem nimis oderat, Lucilia suum quem nimis amaverat (Livia murdered her husband whom she hated excessively, and Lucilia murdered hers whom she had loved exces. sively). See Bayles's Dictionary, article Lucretius. None of the editors of Lucretius whom I have consulted, not even Monro, throw any light on this mysterious quotation of Bayles's.' It seem'd A void was made in Nature; all her bonds ' This distinguished scholar has plenty to say about the use of is or es in the accusative plural of words ending in ium in the genitive plural, but not one word does he say about the legend which inspired Tennyson's poem, |