“Next mornin’ he gets up, has a fire lit, orders in three shillins’ worth o’ crumpets, toasts ’em all, eats ’em all, and blows his brains out.”
Washington Irving’s “Pride of the Village,” in his “Sketch Book,” has for its backbone the pathetic story of a blasted life and a broken heart, which, it seems likely, may have afforded to Tennyson the suggestion for his exquisite May Queen, inasmuch as Irving’s “Pride of the Village” was also “Queen of the May,” “crowned with flowers and blushing and smiling in all the beautiful confusion of girlish diffidence and delight.” And then in a later scene we see her wasted and hectic. “She felt a conviction that she was hastening to the tomb, but looked forward to it as a place of rest. The silver cord that had bound her to existence was loosed, and there seemed to be no more pleasure under the sun.” The Laureate’s May Queen is touched by the sweetness “of all the land about and all the flowers that blow;” and the “Pride of the Village” would “totter to the window, where, propped up in her chair, it was her enjoyment to sit all day and look out upon the landscape.” The May Queen of the poet exults in the honeysuckle that “round the porch has woven its wavy bowers,” and she is anxious when she is gone little Effie should “train the rose-bush that she set about the parlor window,” and to Irving’s “Pride of the Village” “the soft air that stole in [through the lattice] brought with it the fragrance of the clustering honeysuckle which her own hands had trained round the window.” The May Queen reaches forward to view her grave “just beneath the hawthorne shade” and wills that Effie shall not come to see her till it be “growing green,” and in Irving’s sketch “evergreens had been planted about the grave of the village favorite, and osiers were bent over to keep the turf uninjured.”
Ah, Christ, that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved that they might tell us
What and where they be.
Tennyson, “Maud.”
Oh that it were possible we might
But hold some two days’ conference with the dead!
From whom I should learn somewhat I am sure