O sad No more! O sweet No more!
O strange No more!
By a mossed brookbank on a stone
I smelt a wildweed flower alone;
There was a ringing in my ears,
And both my eyes gushed out with tears.
Surely all pleasant things had gone before,
Low-buried fathom deep beneath with thee,
No More!
The true Tennysonian ring is in the thirty-one lines of " A Fragment," forewarning of the glorious instrument of beauty blank verse was to become later on in the "Idyls of the King":
Where is the Giant of the Sun, which stood
In the midnoon the glory of old Rhodes,
A perfect Idol with profulgent brows
Far sheening down the purple seas to those
Who sailed from Mizraim underneath the star
Named of the Dragon—and between whose limbs
Of brassy vastness broad-blown Argosies
Drave into haven? Yet endure unscathed
Of changeful cycles the great Pyramids
Broad-based amid the fleeting sands, and sloped
Into the slumberous summer noon; but where,
Mysterious Egypt, are thine obelisks
Graven with gorgeous emblems undiscerned?
Thy placid Sphinxes brooding o'er the Nile?
Thy shadowing Idols in the solitudes,
Awful Memnonian countenances calm
Looking athwart the burning flats, far off
Seen by the high-necked camel on the verge
Journeying southward? Where are thy monuments
Piled by the strong and sunborn Anakim
Over their crowned brethren Ox and Oph?
Thy Memnon, when his peaceful lips are kissed
With earliest rays, that from his mother's eyes
Flow over the Arabian bay, no more
Breathes low into the charmed ears of morn
Clear melody flattering the crisped Nile
By columned Thebes. Old Memphis hath gone down:
The Pharaohs are no more: somewhere in death
They sleep with staring eyes and gilded lips.
Wrapped round with spiced cerements in old grots
Rock-hewn and sealed for ever.
A veil of mystery overhangs the Continental tour of Tennyson and Hallam in 1830: of it we are told in the Life no record has been preserved. But of the journey through Spain a reminiscence remains in the poem contributed to the Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832:
There are three things that fill my heart with sighs
And steep my soul in laughter (when I view
Fair maiden forms moving like melodies).
Dimples, roselips, and eyes of any hue.
There are three things beneath the blessed skies
For which I live—black eyes, and brown and blue;
I hold them all most dear; but oh! black eyes,
I live and die, and only die for you.
Of late such eyes looked at me—while I mused
At sunset, underneath a shadowy plane
In old Bayona, nigh the Southern Sea—
From an half-open lattice looked at me.
I saw no more only those eyes—confused
And dazzled to the heart with glorious pain.
In December, 1832, Tennyson's second volume was issued, and sold about 300 copies. Its reception by the reviewers was less than doubtful, the Quarterly in particular distinguishing itself by a savage attack. Tennyson's reply was ten years' silence, broken only by the publication of "St. Agnes" in Lady Blessington's annual for 1837, The Keepsake, and by the appearance, the same year, in Lord Northampton's volume The Tribute, of the exquisite poem, as Mr. Andrew Lang rates it, "Oh that 'twere possible," which was to become the germ of "Maud," published twenty-three years later. Over this contribution a passage of arms occurred between Tennyson and Monckton Milnes. Milnes had written begging for a contribution to a volume Lord Northampton was editing on behalf of the destitute family of a man of letters, and Tennyson in serio-sarcastic vein replied:
"Three summers back, provoked by the incivility of editors, I swore an oath I would never again have to do with their vapid books, and brake it in the sweet face of Heaven when T wrote for Lady What's-her-name Wortley. But then her sister wrote Brookfield and said she (Lady W.) was beautiful, so I could not help it. But whether the Marquis be beautiful or not I don't much mind; if he be let him give
