The little snakes' of silver throat, As to the other names of dramatic note in these preVictorian days, the songs of Sir Henry Taylor, whether in Philip van Artevelde or elsewhere, are really pitiful for a Southeyan of such estimable repute; and those of Bulwer, Lord Lytton, which are equally remote from the influences of our earlier poets, belong to the easy, trivial school of Moore and Procter, touched with the prevalent Byronism. In this chapter we have considered the leaders of the romantic revival and enumerated some of their lesser brethren who wrote lyrically. We have treated many who, although they began to write earlier, wrote on into the reign of Queen Victoria. We must defer to the next chapter such as began to write only in her reign or those whose actual poetical activity received the impetus that placed it in its true orbit subsequent to the queen's accession. The thirties wrought havoc among the poets; Scott and Crabbe died in 1832, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834, Hogg a year later. Among the names mentioned above, Southey, Hood, and Darley lived on into the forties, the two latter active in literature to the last. Moore closed his long career with his Poetical Works in ten volumes, 1840-41, and lived on for nearly a dozen years; Hunt wrote to the last, publishing Stories in Verse as late as 1855, four years before his death. Procter's work like that of Peacock, Elliott, Wells, and several others, belonged, by Victoria's time, to the past. Wells and Peacock survived into the seventies; Taylor, Barnes, and Horne, into the eighties. But among the veterans of early nineteenth-century poetry, Wordsworth and Landor alone continued productive far into the reign. Wordsworth wrote and published poetry in six decades; Landor in eight, bridging the age of Cowper and that of Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, whither we are now to follow him. CHAPTER VII THE VICTORIAN LYRISTS ITH the great Victorian laureate dead, even now only a score of years, and his throne unfilled, however occupied as who could fill that spacious chair of regal poetic state? - it seems all but incredible that verse of Alfred Tennyson's should have seen print in the year 1826. It was in that year that Poems by Two Brothers (there were really three) was published with little promise, it must be confessed, of the glory that was to come. Nor were Tennyson's first unaided poetical efforts, the volumes of 1830 and 1832, however promising to discerning minds, wholly undeserving of the disapproval that the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's meted out to them. But Tennyson was not born to failure; and, unlike most men of sensitive poetic endowment, an iron will nerved him to snatch success from defeat. For ten years he was silent, undiverted by temptation to other occupations, living simply and with economy as he untiringly perfected his art; and with the Poems of 1842, the added ones and those revised, it was known if still only to the few that another great English poet had arisen to maintain the high traditions of the past. The Tennysons were gentle folk, and all that tradition, restraint, cultivated surroundings, college life, and reverence could do for him had part in the poet's education. Neither passion, ill health, nor extreme poverty assailed him; and soon popular acclaim was his. He succeeded Wordsworth as poet laureate in 1850, and was raised to the peerage as Lord Tennyson in 1884. A chronology of the books of poems of Tennyson, contributed to the Memoir of his life by his son, comprises sixty-three items from the early issues just mentioned to a complete one volume edition in 1894, two years after the poet's death; and this by no means includes all separate and foreign issues. Tennyson's later years reaped a golden reward, and the popularity of his poetry in his lifetime was such as no English poet had known before him. Tennyson grew up with poetry about him. His two brothers wrote other verse besides their first joint endeavor. Charles, who took the name of Turner on succeeding to his uncle's estates, was an excellent sonneteer after the Wordsworthian manner. Frederick, after a first volume, Days and Hours, in 1854, recurred to poetry in his elder years, and more resembles, in weaker mould, the poetic lineaments of his great brother. Both suffered from his august shadow as who save the greatest might not? Tennyson's friend, too, Arthur Hallam, in whose memory he wrote the magnificent requiem, "In Memoriam," left at his untimely death some estimable minor poetry; and Edward FitzGerald, whose affectionate enthusiasm never allowed that there was a greater Tennyson than that of the first fruitage of the volume of 1842, afterwards at tained for himself an enviable popularity as one who bettered the translations that he made to give to the dead, especially in Omar Khayyám, a living repute. The earliest literary influence on Tennyson was indubitably that of Keats. A similar definition of line, clarity of vision, capability in descriptive detail, and limpidity of diction are common to both; and both are ruled by the spirit of beauty. But Tennyson has neither the passion of Keats nor his sensuous glow of color. However, Tennyson did not stop here. Wordsworth in his narrative poetry and "subjective view of nature," Spenser in his pictorial mediævalism, Shakespeare for the lilt of his song - all these had Tennyson studied. There are touches of the Byronic despair in Maud, and he disdained not the hectic art of the pre-Raphaelites, his contemporaries, in an occasional lyric, though neither sits naturally upon him. As to the classics, never has poet so absorbed them and so skilfully and legitimately employed reminiscence to illustrate and glorify his lines. If there is a quality in poetry peculiarly Tennyson's, it is the quality of distinction. He elevates whatever he touches, not so much because he transfigures common things as because of his deft selection of what is fit for noble and decorative treatment. Tennyson is a past master in all the graces of his art; awkwardness, obscurity, carelessness, and a medium unfitted to the poetical ends of the moment are intolerable to him and, in his finished poetry, unknown. In the realm of his beautiful art, taste rules perennial; however ornate and elaborate, all is fitting, moderate, fashioned to |