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156
TENNYSONIANA.

to the lines "all composed in a metre of Catullus" and to the ludicrous burlesque of English hexameters and pentameters.

It remains to notice our poet's success in making sound expressive of sense, an art of which there are a few inimitable specimens in Virgil and Pope.

In such lines as—

"Utter your jubilee, steeple and spire!
Clash, ye bells, in the merry March air!"[1]

we can actually hear the church-bells pealing forth their joyous epithalamium; and who does not hear the distant approach of horsemen in

"The sound of many a heavily-galloping hoof,"[2]

or "the shingle grinding in the surge," or the echoes "dying, dying, dying"? Is not the struggle with the water, where the Prince is rescuing Ida, admirably conveyed in the line

"Strove to buffet to land in vain"?

I leave the reader to recollect other equally fine imitative metres.

  1. "A Welcome to Alexandra."
  2. "Idylls of the King," p. 69.