[106] In the "Haidee" song. V. sup. Scanned Conspectus, § XLIV.
[107] With "long measure," but with the last line cut down to a monometer:
O! what | can ail | thee, knight-|at-arms,
Alone | and pale|ly loi|tering?
The sedge | has with|ered from | the lake,
And no | birds sing.
This last line being sometimes exquisitely equivalenced in the first foot:
Ănd hĕr ēyes | wĕre wīld.
. . . . . . .
Ŏn thĕ cōld | hill side.
CHAPTER VI
THE LAST STAGE—TENNYSON TO SWINBURNE
From Keats to Tennyson.
The lesson of the last chapter, if properly learnt, will have shown the substitution of a more really "correct," because wider and freer, view of English prosody than that which had produced the narrow and blinkered pseudo-correctness of the eighteenth century, and the way in which this extension was, whether consciously or unconsciously, utilised by the great poets of 1798-1830. Consciously, however, this lesson was not learnt by all of these poets themselves; yet it spread, and rapidly became the general, if not yet the acknowledged, principle of English poetry. It is observable in most and in all the best of what have been called the "Intermediates"—the poets who were born between 1790 and 1810, such as Beddoes and Darley,[108] Macaulay and Praed. But in Tennyson at once and in Browning—the one born just before, the other just after, the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century—it manifests itself in the most unmistakable degree; so much so, indeed, as to have actually puzzled, if not shocked, Coleridge himself, the greatest restorer of its mainspring. Tennyson's first volumes are open to many just criticisms. But if the student will turn to the scanned examples of the "Hollyhock Song" and the "Dying Swan" given previously, he will see that the young poet, so far from having "begun to write without knowing very well what metre is," had begun with an almost absolutely perfect knowledge of it, whatever his shortcomings in other matters might be.[109]