Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892
Nor did Paris linger in his lofty halls, but when he had girt on his
gorgeous armour, all of varied bronze, then he rushed thro’ the city,
glorying in his airy feet. And as when a stall-kept horse, that is
barley-fed at the manger, breaketh his tether, and dasheth thro’ the
plain, spurning it, being wont to bathe himself in the fair-running
river, rioting, and reareth his head, and his mane flieth back on
either shoulder, and he glorieth in his beauty, and his knees bear
him at the gallop to the haunts and meadows of the mares; so ran the
son of Priam, Paris, from the height of Pergamus, all in arms,
glittering like the sun, laughing for light-heartedness, and his
swift feet bare him.
In February 1865 Tennyson lost the mother whose portrait he drew in
_Isabel_,—“a thing enskied and sainted.”
In the autumn of 1865 the Tennysons went on a Continental tour, and
visited Waterloo, Weimar, and Dresden; in September they entertained Emma
I., Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The months passed quietly at home or
in town. The poet had written his _Lucretius_, and, to please Sir George
Grove, wrote _The Song of the Wrens_, for music. Tennyson had not that
positive aversion to music which marked Dr Johnson, Victor Hugo,
Théophile Gautier, and some other poets. Nay, he liked Beethoven, which
places him higher in the musical scale than Scott, who did not rise above
a Border lilt or a Jacobite ditty. The Wren songs, entitled _The
Window_, were privately printed by Sir Ivor Guest in 1867, were set to
music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and published by Strahan in December 1870.
“A puppet,” Tennyson called the song-book, “whose only merit is, perhaps,
that it can dance to Mr Sullivan’s instrument. I am sorry that my puppet
should have to dance at all in the dark shadow of these days” (the siege
of Paris), “but the music is now completed, and I am bound by my
promise.” The verses are described as “partly in the old style,” but the
true old style of the Elizabethan and cavalier days is lost.
In the summer of 1867 the Tennysons moved to a farmhouse near Haslemere,
at that time not a centre of literary Londoners. “Sandy soil and
heather-scented air” allured them, and the result was the purchase of
land, and the building of Aldworth, Mr Knowles being the architect. In
autumn Tennyson visited Lyme Regis, and, like all other travellers
thither, made a pilgrimage to the Cobb, sacred to Louisa Musgrove. The
poet now began the study of Hebrew, having a mind to translate the Book
of Job, a vision unfulfilled. In 1868 he thought of publishing his
boyish piece, _The Lover’s Tale_, but delayed. An anonymously edited
piracy of this and other poems was perpetrated in 1875, limited, at least
nominally, to fifty copies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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