And somewhere there, unknown to public view,
A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.”
Tennyson competed because his father wished him to, and “in place of preparing a new poem he furbished up an old one written in blank verse instead of the orthodox heroic couplet and sent it in.”[[2]] Milnes wrote at the time, “Tennyson’s poem has made quite a sensation; it is certainly equal to most parts of Milton!” The future Lord Houghton was a cheerful, genial person, if he was guilty of the most abominable handwriting I ever encountered, for the celebrated scrawls of James Payn, Charles Darwin and Horace Greeley are copperplate script in comparison; and Milnes was only twenty then. I knew quite a number of Tennysons and Miltons, of the mute, inglorious sort, when I was enjoying the enthusiasms of that period of life, under the shadow of the Princeton elms; but somehow their chariots have all been transformed into motor-cars, although they have avoided the fate of Phaëthon, that mythological prototype of a chauffeur.
“Pompeii”, naturally enough, is a fair example of the stilted verse which a bright lad might well have written in 1819. He tells us, among other interesting details, how
“In vain Vesuvius groans with wrath supprest,
And mutter’d thunder in his burning breast,
Long since the Eagle from that flaming peak
Hath soar’d with screams a safer nest to seek.
Aw’d by th’ infernal beacon’s fitful glare
The howling fox hath left his wonted lair;