city, the heated blasts bursting in the doors of defiled sanctuaries all these come with a thousand recollections of wild tales in medieval romances and chronicles. And the praise of Chaucer and of the great literature of the Elizabethan age are the echoes of hundreds of hours of delight spent in reading. There is no method, as has been said, of supplying the reader suddenly with all this experience of literature, with all these associations, with all this richness of emotional life. An editor may cite examples to explain every line, may pile up instance upon instance until the intellect is thoroughly convinced that such things were common, but not in this way can the reader gain those associations and memories which alone give significance and power to the great figures of history and romance and myth or the scenes and manners of past ages. The only method is to do as the poet himself has done, read these poems and histories, and amass the associations and emotions of this experience with literature.

The third element is the rich and elaborate diction. Here, as with the first element, we are on easier ground; we are dealing with matters which the intellect and imagination can compass immediately by knowledge and native vigor. Such lines as,

"The maiden splendours of the morning star," (1.55),

"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,

And most divinely fair," (ll. 87-88), "The star-like sorrows of immortal eyes," (1. 91), "The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes," (1. III),

"A queen, with swarthy cheeks and bold black

eyes,

Brow-bound with burning gold," (l. 127-128),

reveal their meanings at once to any one who has imagination. But sometimes Tennyson substitutes the ornate and elaborate for the simple and imaginative, and produces lines that require some ingenuity for interpretation. How many a reader has not beaten his brains to find out what is meant in 1. I by "before my eyelids dropt their shade"! It is, indeed, a rather elaborate way of saying, "before I closed my eyes to sleep," and the feeling that it must mean more is so strong that some will still strive vainly for a more mystical interpretation, in spite of the fact that the poem obviously narrates the events of one night, when the poet, after reading Chaucer, passes through that stage of visions which precedes sleep, into a sleep of dreams and finally

wakes and tries to recall his dreams. "The crested bird that claps his wings at dawn" (1. 179 f.) has also shed much ink. If Tennyson meant the cock and took this method of slipping that brilliant but rather prosaic fowl into his bediamonded poetry, we may be glad that it is possible to rescue him by arguing in favor of the crested lark of Theocritus and insisting that no modern student of poetry, as Tennyson was, could write

"That claps his wings at dawn,"

without remembering those exquisite lines of John Lyly's:

"Now at heaven's gates she claps her wings, The morn not waking till she sings."

Tennyson's poem, though obviously suggested by Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, bears only superficial and unessential resemblances to it. It is true that both poems deal with ill-fated fair women, that in both the poet dreams, and it is even possible that Tennyson has taken front other of Chaucer's poems the thoroughly conventional device of falling asleep after reading a book that determines the subject of his dream. But aside from the fact that Chaucer's style is simple and his mood relaxed and easy, while Tennyson's style is ornate and his mood one of the utmost intensity, the purely external features are very different. The scene of Chaucer's dream is a meadow filled with all the gladness of a May morning, singing birds and blossoming flowers and "softe, swote, greene grass"; the scene of Tennyson's is an ancient wood, oppressive with huge elms, hanging vines, dark walks, a deadly silence, and a pale chill light from the dying dawn. Chaucer meets in his dream the brilliant God of Love and his queen, accompanied by a group of charming maidens, and for sufficiently valid reasons promises to write each succeeding year the story of some fair woman who had been faithful though unfortunate in love; Tennyson meets and converses for a few vivid moments with women, fair and unfortunate, but by no means chiefly "Love's martyrs." It seems not improbable that Tennyson may have been, consciously or unconsciously, influenced by the procession of noble ladies with whom Odysseus spoke in Hades (Odyssey, Bk. XI).

The structure of the poem is very simple and clear:

Il. 1-13. What the poet had been reading and the immediate effect of it.

ll. 13-52. He muses on what he has read, and

visions of ancient strife and wrong pass in vivid pictures before his eyes as he is falling asleep.

11. 53-84. He then dreams he is in a great forest, made gloomy by its huge trees, its dank festoons of jasmine, its long, dark, dew-drenched walks, its uncanny silence, and the cold pale light that followed the fading of the first dim flush of morn. His melancholy is increased by the odor of hidden violets bringing memories of happier times, and a voice within him tells him he will always stay in this dark wood.

11. 85-260. There come before him in his dream women like those of Chaucer's Legend, beautiful heroines of tragic story-Helen of Troy, Iphigenia, Cleopatra, Jephthah's daughter, and the illfated Rosamond.

11. 261-272. Then as he slowly awakes, he catches glimpses of certain other ill-starred heroines, Margaret Roper, Joan of Arc, and Eleanor, wife of Edward I.

11. 273-288. With difficulty he recalled his dream and often vainly strove to strike again into the same dream.

Details that may deserve explanation or comment are the following:

P. 525. l. 17-52. The vividness of these hypnagogic figures approaches nearly to hallucination. Every one has, at times, in falling asleep slowly, had more or less vivid images pass before his eyes. Some persons have them constantly. Tennyson may have been more than usually sensitive to them. See the remarks on St. Agnes' Eve for what he says of his experiences of trance-like seizures, and compare also De Quincey, p. 438.

11. 73-76. Apparently the poet makes the unblissful wood of his dream one which he had known in real life under happier circumstances. Dante's famous lines:

"Nessun maggior dolore

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria,"

it will be remembered, had impressed him when he was a boy of twelve, long before he so tawdrily translated them as

"A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things,"

and it may be that here and in 11. 77-80 he shaped his poem in accordance with them.

P. 526. 1. 87. The beauty and self-sufficingness of this line sometimes make us forget, what the poet remembered, that Helen was, according to the myth, the daughter of Zeus, and therefore divinely tall.

11. 100-116. In his picture of Iphigenia, Tenny son apparently follows the story as told in the first Chorus of the Agamemnon of Eschylus, with perhaps recollections of the Electra of Sophocles, but there are also expressions which indicate that the touching scenes of Iphigenia in Aulis were in his mind, though he necessarily rejected the vicarious sacrifice narrated by Euripides. There is no way to obtain the full effect of this passage but to read these plays.

ll. 118-120. These words of Helen's are almost a transcript of what she says in the Iliad, VI, 345 ff., to Hector when Paris seems slow to prepare for battle:

"My brother, even mine, that am a dog mischievous and abominable, would that on the day when my mother bare me at the first, an evil storm-wind had caught me away to a mountain or a billow had swept me away before all these things came to pass."

Il. 127-128. Critics have chided Tennyson for forgetting that Cleopatra was a Greek, fair and blue-eyed; but he saw the Cleopatra of romance, not her of history. And this one must be swarthy and bold-eyed, as Tennyson saw her; a "gypsy". with a "tawny front" as she appeared to Shakespeare's Mark Antony.

P. 527. l. 174. Clearly Tennyson did not visualize this image, or he would have cancelled it. It is neither beautiful nor possible as a picture.

Il. 177-242. The story of Jephthah's daughter, in Judges, xi, should be read, even if it is already familiar.

P. 528. 11. 249-260. The romance of Rosamond and Henry II of England and her death at the hands of his queen, Eleanor, are told in almost every history of England.

1. 259. Some of the commentators seem to have missed the point of Cleopatra's mention of Fulvia. As she counsels Rosamond to use the dagger, her own rival, Fulvia, comes to her mind, as in Shakespeare's play, and, forgetting Rosamond and Elcanor, she herself becomes heroine and prime actor in the imagined event.

1. 266. The devotion of Margaret Roper to her father, Sir Thomas More, is one of the fine incidents of history. To feel it as Tennyson did, one must know, as perhaps one may from Green's History of the English People, the power and charm of Sir Thomas More and his tragic fate.

1. 268. This line, with its reticence and moderation, suggests to one familiar with the wonderful story of the Maid of Orleans all the glamour and

beauty that attach to one of the most romantic and mysterious figures the world has ever seen.

II. 285-288. This ending is weak, because it is very obscure. The difficulty is not so much with the rhetorical figures of the chosen words withering beneath the palate and the heart fainting in its own heat as with the doubt whether these four lines are to be taken with ll. 281-284, or whether they really connect in thought, though not in syntax, with the efforts of the poet to recall and record the glimpses of his dream.

MORTE D'ARTHUR

This is Tennyson's earliest attempt at the epic treatment of Arthurian romance, and the treatment is simply epic, not allegorical, as is the case with the Idylls written after 1859. The immediate source of the poem is Sir Thomas Malory's famous Morte Darthur (Bk. XXI, Chaps. 4 and 5). It will be observed that Tennyson follows Malory very closely, though there are some interesting changes.

Tennyson himself speaks of the poem as full of faint Homeric echoes, but there are few of any significance. The most interesting is ll. 105-106, which seem to echo the words of Hephaistos, Iliad, xviii, 400 ff.: "Nine years with them [the sea-nymphs Thetis and Eurynome] I wrought much cunning work of bronze, brooches and spiral arm-bands and cups and necklaces, in the hollow caves, while around me the stream of ocean with murmuring foam flowed infinite." There are also faint echoes of other classical writers, the most important being 1. 60, a close rendering of Æneid, iv, 285, viii, 20, and 1. 240, perhaps an echo of Lucretius, De Rer. Nat., iii, 976 f. :

"Cedit enim, rerum nouitate extrusa, uetustas Semper, et ex aliis aliud reparare necesse est";

for the idea, cf. also Plato's Banquet, 207-208.

1. 1. Chapter 4 of Malory's account tells how the battle raged all day long, till all were dead in both armies except King Arthur, Syr Bedwere, and his brother Syr Lucan.

1. 8. In Malory, Arthur is borne to the little chapel by the two brothers, but Syr Lucan dies soon after. Tennyson has omitted Lucan in order to concentrate attention on Arthur and Bedivere.

P. 529. ll. 38, 44. Note the epic repetition here. Collect other examples from the poem. This is, perhaps, due to the influence of Homer.

P. 530. 1. 123. Note the archaic character of the syntax here and elsewhere. It is meant to

give dignity to the language and to suggest antiquity.

11. 169-170. The passage from the Agamemnon, 240, cited by Mustard does not seem to express the same idea as this: "She smote each of her sacrificers with a piteous glance from her eye, remarkable in her beauty as in a picture."

P. 531. 1. 255. A Platonic idea, taken over directly or indirectly by many later writers, among them Boethius (cf. Chaucer's translation of Boethius, Bk. I, Metre v, and Bk. II, Metre viii, where the chain is Love).

11. 260 ff. The relation of Avilion to other ideal lands is uncertain. These lines may have been suggested by the description of Olympus in the Odyssey, vi, 43 ff. But they are more like the description of the Earthly Paradise in Lactantius, De Ave Phonice, 1-30, expanded into eighty-five lines in the Anglo-Saxon translation (Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader contains both versions); for a modern English rendering see Cook and Tinker's Old English Poetry. The Celtic conception of the Otherworld is similar, and is given in several of the older poems.

1. 267. Tennyson cannot have failed to remember the beautiful passage in which Socrates argues that the dying swan does not sing for grief but as "foreseeing the blessings of the other world," Phado, 85.

ULYSSES

P. 532. "Ulysses," says Tennyson, "was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death and gave my feeling about going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam" (Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Memoir, by his son, I, p. 196). It is based upon the following passage in Dante's Divina Commedia, Inferno, XXVI, 90–142:

"When I departed from Circe, who had retained me more than a year there near to Gaeta, before Æneas had so named it, neither fondness for my son, nor piety for my old father, nor the due love that should have made Penelope glad, could overcome within me the ardor that I had to gain experience of the world and of the vices of men, and of their valor. But I put forth on the deep open sea, with one vessel only, and with that little company by which I had not been deserted. One shore and the other I saw as far as Spain, far as Morocco and the island of Sardinia, and the rest which that sea bathes round about. I and my companions were old and slow when we came to that narrow strait where Hercules set up his bounds,

to the end that man may not put out beyond. On the right hand I left Seville, on the other already I had left Ceuta. 'O brothers,' said I, 'who through a hundred thousand perils have reached the West, to this so little vigil of your senses that remains be ye unwilling to deny the experience, following the sun, of the world that hath no people? Consider ye your origin; ye were not made to live as brutes, but for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.' With this little speech I made my companions so eager for the road that hardly afterwards could I have held them back. And turning our stern to the morning, with our oars we made wings for the mad flight, always gaining on the left-hand side. The night saw now all the stars of the other pole, and ours so low that it rose not forth from the ocean floor. Five times rekindled and as many que ached was the light beneath the moon, since we had entered on the deep pass, when there appeared to us a mountain dim through the distance, and it appeared to me so high as I had not seen any. We rejoiced thereat, and soon it turned to lamentation, for from the strange land a whirlwind rose, and struck the fore part of the vessel. Three times it made her whirl with all the waters, the fourth it made her stern lift up, and the prow go down, as pleased Another, till the sea had closed

over us.

It will be seen that Tennyson's conception of Ulysses is precisely the same as is Dante's in this passage. It is true Dante places Ulysses among the "evil counsellors" in the eighth pit of the eighth circle of Hell, but no hint of that appears in this passage. This is not the place to discuss the discrepancies between Homer's account and Dante's, but it may be noted that the death of Ulysses at sea is not one of them, as some commentators have said, for Tiresias explicitly tells Odysseus, Odyssey, xi, 136 ff.:

"And from the sea shall thine own death come, the gentlest death that may be." Dante's notion that Ulysses sailed into the unknown west was apparently suggested by certain traditions connecting him with Scotland and Lisbon, according to Grion in Il Propugnatore, III, 1a, pp. 67-72. The main difference between Dante's account and Tennyson's is that in the former Ulysses sets out from Circe's island, while in the latter he sets out from Ithaca. In both, he and his companions are old. In both, the companions are apparently men who were with him at Troy and on the homeward journey, though, according to Homer, all these had perished.

Tennyson's poem is full of reminiscences of the classics, as is quite natural.

Every lover of poetry should note the fine application of ll. 51-53, and 62-70 in the last page of Huxley's eloquent "Romanes Lecture" on Evolution and Ethics, and read what he has to say about Tennyson and Browning in the appended

note.

LOCKSLEY HALL

As poetry, this does not rank with Tennyson's best productions, but its mood of mingled melancholy and optimism hit the taste of the time when it was written (1842) and it has ever since been a favorite with youths who feel that the world is out of joint and at the same time cannot resist the strong tide of vital impulses.

The poem is not autobiographical but dramatic. It was suggested by an Arabian poem, translated by Sir William Jones, the great oriental scholar. Perhaps the most interesting lines of the poem to the present-day reader are the prophecies of social and scientific progress, ll. 117–138.

P. 535. Lines 135-136 shadow forth the slow attack of democracy upon ancient privilege and authority.

P. 536. l. 181-182. Tennyson explained that when he first rode on a railway train he thought that the wheels ran in grooved rails.

ST. AGNES' EVE

P. 537. In a letter to Spedding in 1834 Tennyson says: "I daresay you are right about the stanza in Sir Galahad, who was intended as a male counterpart to St. Agnes.' This seems to indicate that in the poem bearing her name St. Agnes is the speaker, and not, as the poem suggests, some unknown nun. St. Agnes' eve is January 20. It was threatened by her persecutors that she should be debauched in the public stews before her execution, but in answer to her prayers she was miraculously preserved from this fate by lightning. Eight days later at her tomb her parents saw her in a vision among a troop of angels.

This poem expresses her religious aspiration, which in stanza 3 becomes ecstatic mystical vision. This is the point Tennyson refers to when he speaks of Sir Galahad as the male counterpart of St. Agnes. The lines especially noteworthy in this respect in Sir Galahad are 25-48, 63-80. Such mystical ecstasy as finds expression in these two poems is common in the experience of mystics. Mystical vision is often preceded by other phenomena. Richard Rolle (see Horstman's

Works of R. Rolle, Vol. I), the greatest of mediaval English mystics, felt first a delightful warmth in his bosom, then tasted delicious food and heard heavenly music. Similar experiences are related of St. Catherine of Sienna and many others.

The tendency to fall into a mystic trance in which the external world seems unreal is characteristic of certain temperaments (see note on Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality, ll. 141 ff.). Tennyson says of himself: "A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life." Note in this connection the weird seizures of the Prince, added to The Princess in 1851.

SIR GALAHAD

In medieval romance the stories of the Holy Grail and the quest for it vary greatly. Tennyson follows Malory (Bks. XI, XIII, XVII), in making Sir Galahad the knight of the Grail and the Grail itself the sacred vessel containing some of the blood of Christ.

See note on St. Agnes' Eve.

IN MEMORIAM

Pp. 540 ff. In Memoriam is a series of elegiac poems, written between 1833 and 1850 and expressing various phases of Tennyson's grief at the loss of Arthur Hallam, his most intimate friend in boyhood and youth. No doubt the grief becomes monotonous to the reader if he undertakes to read the whole series at a sitting, but the themes - the aspects of grief-are many and varied, and it is to be borne in mind that they are a record of many years of permanent consciousness of loss. They contain some of Tennyson's sincerest and best work and have found responsive echoes in many bereaved hearts.

The Proem, written in 1849, is Tennyson's summary of his attitude toward the mystery of bereavement.

Cantos I and XXVII are closely connected in thought and feeling.

Cantos XXXI and XXXII form almost a single poem on a single theme.

Canto LIV is the last of a series in which the poet discusses the carelessness and waste of Nature as revealed especially in the geological records, which show that not only individuals but whole species have perished: in this canto he takes refuge in a vague hope and trust.

MERLIN AND THE GLEAM

Pp. 543 ff. Tennyson said: "In the story of Merlin and Nimue I have read that Nimue means the Gleam which signifies the higher poetic imagination." His career as a poet is expressed in the symbols of the successive stanzas.

CROSSING THE BAR

P. 545. Written in Tennyson's eighty-first year. He instructed his son to put this at the end of all editions of his poems.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE

Pp. 545 ff. These sonnets are not translations, as the title implies, but record the courtship of the Brownings. The title was adopted to disguise their intimate personal tone. Sonnets I and VII allude to the unhappy conditions of Mrs. Browning's life before her marriage. For years she had been an invalid, and her father's jealousy of her friends added to her distress. Her marriage with Browning transported her to a finer, freer life and was followed by many years of improved health. Browning's response to the Sonnets may be inferred from One Word More (pp. 564 ff.) and from his beautiful tribute in The Ring and the Book beginning: