'A water-rat from off the bank
Plunged in the stream. With idle care,
Downlooking through the sedges rank,
I saw your troubled image there.
'If you remember, you had set,
Upon the narrow casement-edge,
A long green box of mignonette
And you were leaning on the ledge.'
The poet's truth to Nature in his 'gummy' chestnut-buds, and to Art in the 'long green box' of mignonette—and that masterful touch of likening the first intrusion of love into the virgin bosom of the Miller's daughter to the plunging of a water-rat into the mill-dam—these are beauties which, we do not fear to say, equal anything even in Keats.
We pass by several songs, sonnets, and small pieces, all of singular merit, to arrive at a class, we may call them, of three poems derived from mythological sources—Œnone, the Hesperides, and the Lotos-eaters. But though the subjects are derived from classical antiquity, Mr. Tennyson treats them with so much originality that he makes them exclusively his own. Œnone, deserted by
'Beautiful Paris, evilhearted Paris,'
sings a kind of dying soliloquy addressed to Mount Ida, in a formula which is sixteen times repeated in this short poem.
'Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.'
She tells her 'dear mother Ida,' that when evilhearted Paris was about to judge between the three goddesses, he hid her (Œnone) behind a rock, whence she had a full view of the naked beauties of the rivals, which broke her heart.
'Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die:—
It was the deep mid noon: one silvery cloud
Had lost his way among the pined hills:
They came—all three—the Olympian goddesses.
Naked they came—
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