“The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings That every sophister can lime.” His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the socialist chants of Mr William Morris, or _Songs before Sunrise_. He had nothing to say about “The blood on the hands of the King, And the lie on the lips of the Priest.” The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are statements of a mythical nature confined to the lips of the clergy. The poet was anxious that freedom should “broaden down,” but “slowly,” not with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in a hurry will never care for the political poems, and it is certain that Tennyson did not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian patriot who said that his darling desire was “to cut the throats of all the _curés_,” like some Covenanters of old. “Mais vous connaissez mon cœur”—“and a pretty black one it is,” thought young Tennyson. So cautious in youth, during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830, Tennyson could not become a convinced revolutionary later. We must accept him with his limitations: nor must we confuse him with the hero of his _Locksley Hall_, one of the most popular, and most parodied, of the poems of 1842: full of beautiful images and “confusions of a wasted youth,” a youth dramatically conceived, and in no way autobiographical. In so marvellous a treasure of precious things as the volumes of 1842, perhaps none is more splendid, perfect, and perdurable than the _Morte d’Arthur_. It had been written seven years earlier, and pronounced by the poet “not bad.” Tennyson was never, perhaps, a very deep Arthurian student. A little cheap copy of Malory was his companion. {39} He does not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German “literature of the subject.” Malory’s compilation (1485) from French and English sources, with the _Mabinogion_ of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with classical memories. “A faint Homeric echo” it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but the absolute voice of old romance, a thing that might have been chanted by “The lonely maiden of the Lake” when “Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps, Upon the hidden bases of the hills.” Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the _Odyssey_— “Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow.” “Softly through the flutes of the Grecians” came first these Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyson’s own _Lucretius_, then in Mr Swinburne’s _Atalanta in Calydon_:— “Lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of west Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea Rolls without wind for ever, and the snow There shows not her white wings and windy feet, Nor thunder nor swift rain saith anything, Nor the sun burns, but all things rest and thrive.”