It may be objected that such poems as 'Locksley Hall' and 'Lady Clara Vere de Vere' are contradictions to this theory; but it must be remembered that these, after all, are but random wanderings from the main path which the Laureate first marked out for himself, and has, in the main, persistently trodden since.
In his earlier poems we find him revelling in the old Homeric traditions, around which he has thrown the magic of a charm peculiarly his own. In these poems we hear, in that exquisite fragment, 'Morte d'Arthur,' the first tentative notes of the song which was later on to burst into the wondrous and sustained melody of his masterpiece, the 'Idylls of the King.' And on this poem, above all others, we think Tennyson's reputation must rest with later generations. Almost Homeric in its breadth and simplicity, it combines the homely pathos, the picturesque variety, and the teeming allegory of our elder minstrels, with the polished grace which springs from a complete command of the highest resources of modern art. The exquisite blank verse—of which, perhaps, no greater master than Tennyson can be named—flows on with an utter disguise of all elaboration and effort. Art has concealed the traces of art. There is no perceptible straining after effect, no struggling to elaborate startling points. The narrative is told with exquisite grace and beauty; and some of the charming lyrics which form the interludes have a delicious cadence which haunts the memory like a melody of Mendelssohn's.
In the 'Idylls of the King' we see Tennyson's characteristic merits at their highest. In it he has taken a field for himself, in which all imitators—and they have been many, no less a poet than Lord Lytton among the number—have signally failed; and here at least, in his capacity of throwing a radiance of new life and beauty about the mouldering legends of antiquity, the Laureate has proved himself unrivalled by living bards.
To compare him with, or to gauge him by, the standard of any of his famous predecessors, as has been sometimes done, would be idle. Like all great artists, he has learnt and adapted from the finest models before him. Beyond this, he is a poet per se, and this is his greatest praise.
Mr. Tennyson was born in 1810 at the parsonage of Somerby, a quiet hamlet in the neighbourhood of Spilsby, in Lincolnshire. Somerby and
