Arms on which the standing muscle sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.
ἐν δὲ μύες στερεοῖσι βραχίοσιν ἄκρον ὑπ’ ὦμον
ἔστασαν, ἠύτε πέτροι ὀλοίτροχοι οὕς τε κυλίνδον
χειμάῤῥους ποταμὸς μεγάλαις περιέξεσε δίναις.
—Idyll, xxii., 48 seq.
(And the muscles on his brawny arms close under the shoulder stood out like boulders which the wintry torrent has rolled and worn smooth with the mighty eddies.)
But there was another use to which Tennyson applied his accurate and intimate acquaintance with the classics. It lay in developing what was suggested by them, in unfolding, so to speak, what was furled in their imagery. Nothing is more striking in ancient classical poetry than its pregnant condensation. It often expresses in an epithet what might be expanded into a detailed picture, or calls up in a single phrase a whole scene or a whole position. Where in Merlin and Vivian Tennyson described
The blind wave feeling round his long sea hall
In silence,
he was merely unfolding to its full Homer’s κῦμα κωφόν—“dumb wave”; just as the best of all comments on Horace’s expression, “Vultus nimium lubricus aspici,” Odes, I., xix., 8, is given us in Tennyson’s picture of the Oread in Lucretius:—
How the sun delights
To glance and shift about her slippery sides.
Or take again this passage in the Agamemnon, 404-5, describing Menelaus pining in his desolate palace for the lost Helen:—
πόθῳ δ’ ὑπερποντίας
φάσμα δόξει δόμων ἀνάσσειν
(And in his yearning love for her who is over the sea a phantom will seem to reign over his palace.)
What are the lines in Guinevere but an expansion of what is latent but unfolded in the pregnant suggestiveness of the Greek poet:—
And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk
Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,
And I should evermore be vex’d with thee
In hanging robe or vacant ornament,
Or ghostly foot-fall echoing on the stair—
with a reminiscence also perhaps of Constance’s speech in King John, III., iv.