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Moses. Alexander Smith, the author of Dreamthorp, himself a poet of no mean order, and who has written a neglected novel named 'Alfred Haggart's Household,' which is as sweet as anything that has appeared since the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' says of England's Poet-Laureate, 'Mr. Tennyson does not imitate so much as he is imitated, but even in his ear there have lingered notes from the other side of the Atlantic.' Then quoting the last stanza of the famous garden song in Maude—
'She is coming, my own, my sweet:
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthen bed;
My dust would heal her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead,—
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red'—
he observes, 'in these lines a quick ear detects Poe's music ringing like a silver bell.'
With much greater reason than Alexander Smith, we might ask if the lines most often quoted from the Poet-Laureate's Tithonus—and the whole piece itself in all its beauty—is not an echo of Alfred de Vigny's Moise? Let the reader judge. Sings the Poet-Laureate,
'Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I Wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world;'
and again,
'When the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me and restore me to the ground.'
Now hear the poet of France,
'Mon Dieu! Vous m'avez fait puissant et solitaire,
Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre.'
And again,
'Vos anges sont jaloux et m'admirent entre eux . . . .
Et cependant, Seigneur, je ne suis pas heureux.'
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Aussi, loin de m’aimer, voilà qu'ils tremblent tous,
Et quand j'ouvre les bras, on tombe à mes genoux.'
