With golden stars above;
Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.”
But he is not such a poet. Never has he given voice to the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, or to that of which both of these are born—the love of love. Whenever he has attempted it he has failed. He is too retiring, too domestic. “With an inner voice” his river runs, and we have to listen with ears nicely attuned to catch its whisper and its meaning. So inner is it, indeed, that it is often obscure and quite escapes the dull hearing of ordinary men. His first volume, published in 1830, is almost fulsomely dedicated to Queen Victoria, who is certainly not a heroic figure, whatever else she may be. It is a picture gallery filled with Claribels and Lilians, and Isabels and Madelines, and Marianas and Adelines—all very sweet and delicate and dainty, but not inspiring. He sings to “the owl,” he dedicates odes “to memory,” he lingers by “the deserted house,” chants the dirge of “the dying swan,” and so on. In 1832 he enlarges his gallery by the addition of the lovely “Lady of Shalott,” “Mariana in the South,” “Eleänore,” and we come nearer to the poet’s heart in “The Miller’s Daughter,” whom he evidently prefers to the haughty and much-abused “Lady Clara Vere de Vere.” Something, too, of his more marked peculiarities show here in the “Palace of Art” and that dreamy, delicious poem, “The Lotos-Eaters.” He is intensely English—an admirable quality, be it remarked sotto voce, in an English poet laureate. He closes the volume with some strong verses:
“You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas?
“It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,