I can quote no more.
The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a new hope and faith—in short, to a new life. The marks of what it has passed through are seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature, and insight, and scope. The soul has grown and strengthened, we may almost say.
In short, the poem is the inner history of a soul: our deepest feelings, our hopes, our fears, our longings, our weaknesses, our difficulties, all find penetrating, sympathetic, enlightening expression—terse, melodious, inspiring, deeply suggestive—in a word, we feel the magic of poetry.
I have no time left to deal with the large work, which occupied many years, “The Idylls of the King.” It is a series—in blank verse, always melodious and often exquisite, giving the main incidents of the old Arthurian legend, which as a boy he had read with delight in old Malory’s prose epic.
I must content myself with two brief references.
The first idyll, “Gareth and Lynette,” is not in itself one of the most interesting[91]—dealing chiefly as it does with the picture of the eager boy, anxious to be one of Arthur’s knights, who serves a year in menial place as a test of his obedience: but there is one passage which ought never to be omitted in speaking of Tennyson, viz. the answer of the seer when the boys ask him if the castle is enchanted.
The seer answers ironically, yet with a deep meaning, that it is enchanted:
For there is nothing in it as it seems
Saving the King; tho’ some there be that hold
The King a shadow, and the city real.
Then he tells them about the vows: which if they fear to take, he warns them
Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide
Without, among the cattle of the field,
For an ye hear a music, like enow
They are building still, seeing the city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever.