I say intellect advisedly. Not for him such blunders of thought as Coleridge's in "The Ancient Mariner" or Wordsworth's in "Hartleap Well." Coleridge names the sun, moon, and stars as when, in a dream, the sleeping imagination is threatened with some significant illness. We see them in his great poem as apparitions. Coleridge's senses are infinitely and transcendently spiritual. But a candid reader must be permitted to think the mere story silly. The wedding-guest might rise the morrow morn a sadder but he assuredly did not rise a wiser man.
As for Wordsworth, the most beautiful stanzas of "Hartleap Well" are fatally rebuked by the truths of Nature. He shows us the ruins of an aspen wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place, forlorn because an innocent stag, hunted, had there broken his heart in a leap from the rocks above; grass would not grow there.
This beast not unobserved by Nature fell, His death was mourned by sympathy divine.
And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted by the poet to be these woodland ruins--cruelly, because the daily sight of the world blossoming over the agonies of beast and bird is made less tolerable to us by such a fiction.
The Being that is in the clouds and air . . .
Maintains a deep and reverential care For the unoffending creature whom He loves.
The poet offers us as a proof of that "reverential care," the visible alteration of Nature at the scene of suffering--an alteration we have to dispense with every day we pass in the woods.
We are tempted to ask whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--on such grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more than a fictitious sign and a false proof?
Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack upon our reason and our heart. He is more serious than the solemn Wordsworth.
IN MEMORIAM, with all else that Tennyson wrote, tutors, with here and there a subtle word, this nature-loving nation to perceive land, light, sky, and ocean, as he perceived. To this we return, upon this we dwell. He has been to us, firstly, the poet of two geniuses--a small and an immense; secondly, the modern poet who answered in the negative that most significant modern question, French or not French? But he was, before the outset of all our study of him, of all our love of him, the poet of landscape, and this he is more dearly than pen can describe him. This eternal character of his is keen in the verse that is winged to meet a homeward ship with her "dewy decks," and in the sudden island landscape, The clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God.
It is poignant in the garden-night:-
A breeze began to tremble o'er The large leaves of the sycamore, . . .
And gathering freshlier overhead, Rocked the full-foliaged elm, and swung The heavy-folded rose, and flung The lilies to and fro, and said "The dawn, the dawn," and died away.
His are the exalted senses that sensual poets know nothing of. Ithink the sense of hearing as well as the sense of sight, has never been more greatly exalted than by Tennyson:-As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry.
As to this garden-character so much decried I confess that the "lawn" does not generally delight me, the word nor the thing. But in Tennyson's page the word is wonderful, as though it had never been dull: "The mountain lawn was dewy-dark." It is not that he brings the mountains too near or ranks them in his own peculiar garden-plot, but that the word withdraws, withdraws to summits, withdraws into dreams; the lawn is aloft, alone, and as wild as ancient snow. It is the same with many another word or phrase changed, by passing into his vocabulary, into something rich and strange. His own especially is the March month--his "roaring moon."His is the spirit of the dawning month of flowers and storms; the golden, soft names of daffodil and crocus are caught by the gale as you speak them in his verse, in a fine disproportion with the energy and gloom. His was a new apprehension of nature, an increase in the number, and not only in the sum, of our national apprehensions of poetry in nature. Unaware of a separate angel of modern poetry is he who is insensible to the Tennyson note--the new note that we reaffirm even with the notes of Vaughan, Traherne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake well in our ears--the Tennyson note of splendour, all-distinct. He showed the perpetually transfigured landscape in transfiguring words. He is the captain of our dreams. Others have lighted a candle in England, he lit a sun. Through him our daily suns, and also the backward and historic suns long since set, which he did not sing, are magnified; and he bestows upon us an exalted retrospection. Through him Napoleon's sun of Austerlitz rises, for us, with a more brilliant menace upon arms and the plain; through him Fielding's "most melancholy sun" lights the dying man to the setting-forth on that last voyage of his with such an immortal gleam, denying hope, as would not have lighted, for us, the memory of that seaward morning, had our poetry not undergone the illumination, the transcendent vision, of Tennyson's genius.
Emerson knew that the poet speaks adequately then only when he speaks "a little wildly, or with the flower of the mind." Tennyson, the clearest-headed of poets, is our wild poet; wild, notwithstanding that little foppery we know of in him--that walking delicately, like Agag; wild, notwithstanding the work, the ease, the neatness, the finish; notwithstanding the assertion of manliness which, in asserting, somewhat misses that mark; a wilder poet than the rough, than the sensual, than the defiant, than the accuser, than the denouncer. Wild flowers are his--great poet--wild winds, wild lights, wild heart, wild eyes!
