Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder of whole literatures is strewn over his pages. He flung about the resources of the language with a giant's strength, and made new words at every turn. The concreteness and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced by his enormous vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, or any other single writer's in the English tongue. His style lacks the crowning grace of simplicity and repose. It astonishes, but it also fatigues.
Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his attitude than in any special truth which he has preached. It has been the influence of a moralist, of a practical rather than a speculative philosopher. "The end of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been able to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms have been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic age he has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience, silence, and reverence. Ehrfurcht, reverence—the text of his address to the students of Edinburgh University in 1866—is the last word of his philosophy.
In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), a young graduate of Cambridge, published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages entitled Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. The pieces in this little volume, such as the Sleeping Beauty, Ode to Memory, and Recollections of the Arabian Nights, were full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like character, and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's studies, or exercises in music—a few touches of the brush, a few sweet chords, but no aria. A number of them—Claribel, Lilian, Adeline, Isabel, Mariana, Madeline—were sketches of women; not character portraits, like Browning's Men and Women, but impressions of temperament, of delicately differentiated types of feminine beauty. In Mariana, expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid in Shakspere's Measure for Measure, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed an art then peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the central feeling by landscape accessories. The level waste, the stagnant sluices, the neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar, re-enforce, by their monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless waiting and weariness of life in the one human figure of the poem. In Mariana, the Ode to Memory, and the Dying Swan, it was the fens of Cambridge and of his native Lincolnshire that furnished Tennyson's scenery.
Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenched waters run from sky to sky.
A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited a greater scope and variety, but was still in his earlier manner. The studies of feminine types were continued in Margaret, Fatima, Eleanore, Mariana in the South, and A Dream of Fair Women, suggested by Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. In the Lady of Shalott the poet first touched the Arthurian legends. The subject is the same as that of Elaine, in the Idylls of the King, but the treatment is shadowy, and even allegorical. In OEnone and the Lotus Eaters he handled Homeric subjects, but in a romantic fashion which contrasts markedly with the style of his later pieces, Ulysses and Tithonus. These last have the true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of weighty and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general, Tennyson's art is unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite; not statuesque so much as picturesque. He is a great painter, and the critics complain that in passages calling for movement and action—a battle, a tournament, or the like—his figures stand still as in a tableau; and they contrast such passages unfavorably with scenes of the same kind in Scott, and with Browning's spirited ballad, How we Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. In the Palace of Art these elaborate pictorial effects were combined with allegory; in the Lotus Eaters, with that expressive treatment of landscape noted in Mariana; the lotus land, "in which it seemed always afternoon," reflecting and promoting the enchanted indolence of the heroes. Two of the pieces in this 1833 volume, the May Queen and the Miller's Daughter, were Tennyson's first poems of the affections, and as ballads of simple rustic life they anticipated his more perfect idyls in blank verse, such as Dora, the Brook, Edwin Morris, and the Gardener's Daughter. The songs in the Miller's Daughter had a more spontaneous lyrical movement than any thing he had yet published, and foretokened the lovely songs which interlude the divisions of the Princess, the famous Bugle Song, the no-less famous Cradle Song, and the rest. In 1833 Tennyson's friend, Arthur Hallam, died, and the effect of this great sorrow upon the poet was to deepen and strengthen the character of his genius. It turned his mind in upon itself, and set it brooding over questions which his poetry had so far left untouched; the meaning of life and death, the uses of adversity, the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, and the dealings of God with mankind.