touch of hysteria in the highly wrought passion. The poet, under Carlyle's influence, broke here with Manchesterthum: the sword is the voice of God, as a later poet has put it. There was in Maud an indication of emotional power, as in In Memoriam there was an unexpected proof of intellectual power, in one who had hitherto seemed only the idle singer of an empty day. To the poet of In Memoriam and of Maud there seemed no height too high, no poetic exploit too ambitious.
Unhappily, the poet's ambition turned for nearly a quarter of a century into spheres of poetic art where his powers, great as they were, were inadequate. He was not an epic poet, he was not a dramatic poet; yet he devoted his forces at their highest capacity to epic, to drama. An epic is the presentation of a national myth regarded as sacred: the Paradise Lost answers to this description, the Idylls of the King do not. Arthur has never been a national hero: he is mainly the outcome of a long series of literary creation; the Idylls could at best claim only to be a literary epic, not a national one. But the temper required for the literary epic is the romantic, not the classical spirit. There must be something of the Viking delight in battle, a tone of χάρμη, not to mention a certain sensuous glory, surrounding the passion of the epic.
