We cannot, however, pass on to the new poems without expressing our profound disrespect for one selection in this volume. It is notorious that, as we hinted before, authors are poor judges of the relative excellence of their own works. To this rule there are, apparently, no exceptions. Let us take one rankling example. No lover of Tennyson but groans inwardly with disgust over that insane hoot called "The Owl," with its noble description of the very witching hour of night:
"When cats run home, and night is come,"
and the impotent beauty of the poet's ejaculation:
"I would mock thy chant (!) anew,
But I cannot mimic it.
Not a whit of thy tuwhoo,
Thee to woo to thy tuwhit," etc., etc.
—human nature can stand no more of it.
We had long loved to believe that this was a sceptred hermit of an example, wrapped in the solitude of its own unapproachable fatuity. It has gone blinking and tu-whooing through edition after edition, with the muffy solemnity characteristic of the eminent fowl, its subject. But Mr. De Vere has paralleled it at last with a certain "Song" which we find in this volume. On the 4th of September, 1843, in a preface to his first book of verses, [Footnote 60] he tells us that this poem was written considerably earlier than 1840.
[Footnote 60: The Search after Proserpine. Oxford and London. 1855.]
Three years ago, we remember observing and laughing at it, and thinking whether it would not be well to speak of it as the one blemish in all his works, on his elsewhere perfect grammar. Deeming it a mere Homeric dormitation, we passed it by. And now, after thirty years face to face with it, comes Mr. De Vere, at last, and drags from utter and most laudable oblivion this hapless
"SONG.
"He found me sitting among flowers,
My mother's, and my own;
Whiling away too happy hours
With songs of doleful tone.
"My sister came, and laid her book
Upon my lap: and he,
He too into the page would look,
And asked no leave of me.
"The little frightened creature laid
Her face upon my knee—
'You teach your sister, pretty maid;
And I would fain teach thee.'
"He taught me joy more blest, more brief
Than that mild vernal weather:
He taught me love; he taught me grief:
He taught me both together.
"Give me a sun-warmed nook to cry in!
And a wall-flower's perfume—
A nook to cry in, and to die in,
'Mid the ruin's gloom."