The word did
not confine our experience, but from our own being we gave
significance to the word. Into one body we infused many lives, and
it shone as the image of divine or angelic or human thought. For a
word is a Proteus that means to a man what the man is. Three papers
were successively presented.
_Poems_. By ALFRED TENNYSON. Two Volumes. Boston: W. D.
Ticknor.
Tennyson is more simply the songster than any poet of our time.
With him the delight of musical expression is first, the thought
second. It was well observed by one of our companions, that he has
described just what we should suppose to be his method of composition
in this verse from "The Miller's Daughter."
"A love-song I had somewhere read,
An echo from a measured strain,
Beat time to nothing in my head
From some odd corner of the brain.
It haunted me the morning long,
With weary sameness in the rhymes,
_The phantom of a silent song_,
_That went and came a thousand times_."
So large a proportion of even the good poetry of our time is
ever over-ethical or over-passionate, and the stock poetry is so
deeply tainted with a sentimental egotism, that this, whose chief
merits lay in its melody and picturesque power, was most refreshing.
Pages:
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208