Tennyson was a renowned borrower from Latin, from Italian masters. It is difficult indeed to estimate his debt to Horace.
Here are descriptions of castles like that impregnable one of the Niebelungs. Here are lines that tally with Dante—
Come i gru van cantando lor lai.
Here is the modern storehouse of romance, in short, from which scholars, from which poets, drew material. Here are pictures in words which Watteau painted again in colors. Here is an art of writing rich, fluent, as the countless carven marbles of Italy.
No one can write such books today. It belongs to the mammoth, the monumental past. We are little. Its fluency, ease, grace, its inventive power, are incomparable.
There lingers about it the tapestried leisure of ancient monarchies. Not many books keep so securely the atmosphere in which they were first read. The atmosphere that created it dominates.
It belonged to a period that did not know subways nor moving pictures.
It belonged to sheltered corners of old-world gardens, graveled, bordered gravely with cypress, with ilex, where fountains played, where the yellow marbles of Greece, of Rome, were not out of place.
It belonged to luxurious drawing rooms, lighted by long oriel-topped windows, where furniture was slenderly shapen, gilt, and where hundreds of tall white tapers glimmered crisply in the twilight. It belonged to dim corners of walnut or oak, wainscoated libraries, where the early, pale, precious celadon of China gleamed, and ancient pink and blue globes stood, mounted in silver, mounted in crystal.