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was printed under the title of The Window; or the Loves of the Wrens. The poet said—" These little songs, whose almost sole merit-at least till they are wedded to musicis that they are so excellently printed, I dedicate to the printer." We thus have evidence of the personal as well as literary friendship existing between the poet and the translator of the Mabinogion.

The first four of the Idylls were-Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere, and it is generally conceded by the critics that these have a truer Homeric ring than those which followed. The first of these pieces, Enid and Nimue; or the True and the False, had been privately printed in 1857, and never permitted to get into the hands of other than a very few friends; while in 1858 Arthur Clough recorded that he had listened to Tennyson's reading of King Arthur's last interview with the faithless Queen. When Bayard Taylor visited Tennyson, " I spoke," he said, " of the Idyll of Guinevere as being perhaps his finest poem, and said that I could not read it aloud without my voice breaking down at certain passages. 'Why, I can read it and keep my voice!' he exclaimed, triumphantly. This I doubted, and he agreed to try, after we went down to our wives. But the first thing he did was to produce a magnum of wonderful sherry, thirty years old, which had been sent him by a poetic winedealer. Such wine I never tasted. 'It was meant to be drunk by Cleopatra or Catharine of Russia,' said Tennyson. We had two glasses apiece, when he said, 'To-night you shall help me drink one of the few bottles of my Waterloo -1815.' The bottle was brought, and after another glass all round, Tennyson took up the Idylls of the King. His reading is a strange, monotonous chant, with unexpected falling inflexions, which I cannot describe, but can imitate exactly. It is very impressive. In spite of myself I became very much excited as he went on. Finally, when Arthur forgives the Queen, Tennyson's voice fairly broke. I found tears on my cheeks, and Mr and Mrs Tennyson

were crying, one on either side of me. He made an effort and went on to the end, closing grandly. How can you say,' I asked (referring to the previous conversation), 'that you have no surety of permanent fame? This poem will only die with the language in which it is written.' Mrs Tennyson started up from her couch. 'It is true!' she exclaimed; 'I have told Alfred the same thing.'"

In 1869 four new Idylls were published-The Coming of Arthur, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre, and The Passing of Arthur, the original Morte d'Arthur fittingly being interwoven into the last of these, and forming the finale. Two years later the Contemporary Review printed The Last Tournament, and this with Gareth and Lynette was published in the volume of 1872. "It is probable," writes the author of Tennysoniana, "that these additional idylls were an afterthought, and that the first four were all that were originally contemplated." Carlyle found this fare unsatisfying, and complained that the poet was treating his readers "so very like infants, though the lollipops were superlative." Among the earliest and most discriminating of Tennyson's admirers was Prince Albert, and the Idylls heightened his opinion of the Laureate. He read the poems to the Queen, and to the Empress Frederick when she came to England in 1860, pointing out to his daughter at the same time what suitable subjects were suggested to her for pictures. Writing to the poet himself, he said—

"Will you forgive me if I intrude upon your leisure with a request which I have thought some little time of making-viz., that you would be good enough to write your name in the accompanying volume of your Idylls of the King? You would thus add a peculiar interest to the book containing those beautiful songs, from the perusal of which I derived the greatest enjoyment. They quite rekindle the feeling with which the legends of King Arthur must have inspired the chivalry of old, while the graceful form in which they are presented blends those feelings with the softer tone of our present age.-Believe me, always yours truly, "ALBERT."

"BUCKINGHAM PALACE, May 17, 1860."

Soon afterwards it was fated that the "blameless Prince,"

Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,

should pass away; and Tennyson wrote the touching Dedication which serves as elegy and monument to one who seemed "scarce other than his own ideal knight." Twelve years later, when the series was closed, the concluding lines To the Queen were added, and her Majesty was asked, for the sake of the undying love borne to the dead Prince, to accept

This old imperfect tale

New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul.

Perhaps the greatest compliment which Tennyson ever received was that conveyed to him by an old Breton woman, under the following circumstances:

Renan (who, by the way, died but a few days before the poet) and Tennyson were friends, and the former a few years ago, on the visit of the Welsh archeologists to Brittany, related to them an anecdote which had much pleased him. Tennyson had told him that he once stayed a night at Lannion, the birthplace of Renan's mother. Next morning he asked for his bill, but the landlady refused to accept anything. "You are the man," she said, "who has sung our King Arthur, and I cannot charge you anything."

Nothing so tender, so powerful; nothing so vigorous, so fich; nothing so alluring, so stimulating, can be found in any literature as in the legendary history of Arthur-a history which trembles with human passions and glows with spiritual fires, which unites the real and the ideal by links so subtle and so strong-which, like a jewel of rarest workmanship, gathers and clusters the lights of day and emits them again in flashes of tripled splendour. Every student finds new meanings in the theme: for those who seek there are ever bright truths lying beneath the vesture of romance. Stage by stage these wonderful idylls rise to

a climax of majestic height. Tennyson has made King Arthur of a greatness and nobility which causes him to stand forth as epochal-a pillar, a guide, a vision sublime, a reality intense, a faith and a religion for ever. From the shadows and the mists of the past he emerges, and before him spreads a track of light—a path towards that fair ideal we strive to attain.

CHAPTER X.

TENNYSON AS A DRAMATIST.

"The Voices of the day

Are heard across the Voices of the dark."

-The Ring.

IT has been the ambition of most of the successful lyrical poets to attempt dramatic work; why, it would be difficult to explain. They have courted failure in this exacting department of literature with a persistency which, if otherwise directed, might have added greatly to their fame. Love of variety, anxiety to excel in new directions, the craving for public acclamation, the burning desire for life and reality to be given to their conceptions-these may be among the causes which induced poets like Byron, Shelley, Dryden, Coleridge, and Longfellow to leave for a while the Study for the Stage. As it happened, they only succeeded in producing poems cast in the dramatic form, though in justice to Byron it should be stated that he never desired his Manfred to obtain representation. Lord Tennyson's first dramas proved that he possessed the dramatic instinct but not the dramatic faculty. Queen Mary is incomparably ponderous and dull, Shakespearean in its antique garb, but lacking the Shakespearean vitality and spirit—a drama wholly classical in style, but cold, dry, and dead within as the Classics never were. Tennyson in drawing from the stores of the past neglected to give them an attraction for the present. There is no animation in Queen Mary: the men and women do not live and breathe again, but are phantoms of the dead long-ago. We gaze, not upon the mirroring of the past as it was, but upon the past revealed as it is. Instead of beholding the semblance of life we

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