Without
stopping to answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any
part of the debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to
the noblest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on
to Tennyson, his works.
Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of verbal
melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always perfumed, like
the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness--sometimes not, however, but
even then a camellia of the hot-house, never a common flower--the
verse of inside elegance and high-life; and yet preserving amid all
its super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors and outdoor folk. The old
Norman lordhood quality here, too, crossed with that Saxon fiber from
which twain the best current stock of England springs--poetry that
revels above all things in traditions of knights and chivalry, and
deeds of derring-do. The odor of English social life in its
highest range--a melancholy, affectionate, very manly, but dainty
breed--pervading the pages like an invisible scent; the idleness, the
traditions, the mannerisms, the stately _ennui_; the yearning of love,
like a spinal marrow, inside of all; the costumes brocade and satin;
the old houses and furniture--solid oak, no mere veneering--the moldy
secrets everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, the moat, the
English landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the sun inside the
window pane. Never one democratic page; nay, not a line, not a
word; never free and _naive_ poetry, but involved, labored, quite
sophisticated--even when the theme is ever so simple or rustic, (a
shell, a bit of sedge, the commonest love-passage between a lad
and lass,) the handling of the rhyme all showing the scholar and
conventional gentleman; showing the laureate too, the _attache_ of the
throne, and most excellent, too; nothing better through the volumes
than the dedication "to the Queen" at the beginning, and the other
fine dedication, "these to his memory" (Prince Albert's,) preceding
"Idylls of the King.
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