QUERIES ON TENNYSON.
I should be much obliged to any of your correspondents who would explain the following passages of Tennyson:
1. Vision of Sin (Poems, p. 361.):
"God made himself an awful rose of dawn."
2. Vision of Sin (Poems, p. 367.):
"Behold! it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time."
3. In Memoriam, p. 127.:
"Over those ethereal eyes
The bar of Michael Angelo."
(Coleridge, Introduction to Second Lay Sermon, p. xxvi., says:
"Whose ample foreheads, with the weighty bar, ridge-like, above the eye-brows, bespoke observation followed by meditative thought:"
but why the allusion to Michael Angelo?)
[Is our correspondent aware that the "Bar of Michael Angelo" has already formed the subject of a Query from MR. SINGER. See our 2nd Vol., p. 166.]
4. The Princess, p. 66.:
"Dare we dream of that, I ask'd,
Which wrought us, as the workman and his work,
That practice betters."
"Heir of all the ages." Is this traceable to the following lines of Goethe?
"Mein Vermächtniss, wie herrlich weit und breit!
Die Zeit ist mein Vermächtniss, mein Acker ist die Zeit!"
Is the poem "The Lord of Burleigh" founded on fact or not? In an old review of Tennyson in the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly, it is stated to refer to the "mesalliance of the Marquis of Westminster;" but any such notion is denied in the article on "Ballad Poetry" in the last number of that journal.
ERYX.