LORD TENNYSON AS A YOUNG MAN
(From the Picture by Sir T. Lawrence)
What did they write, this regiment of 3,300 littérateurs? Novelists, as we have learned, had fallen upon evil times; poetry was what it still continues to be, a drug in the market; but there was the whole range of the sciences, there were morals, theology, education, travels, biography, history, the literature of Art in all its branches, archæology, ancient and modern literature, criticism, and a hundred other things. Yet, making allowance for everything, I cannot but think that the 3,300 must have had on the whole an idle and unprofitable time. However, some books of the year may be recorded. First of all, in the ‘Annual Register’ for 1837 there appears a poem by Alfred Tennyson. I have copied a portion of it:—
Oh! that ’twere possible,
After long grief and pain,
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!
When I was wont to meet her
In the silent woody places
Of the land that gave me birth,
We stood tranced in long embraces,
Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter
Than anything on earth.
A shadow flits before me—
Not thee but like to thee.
Ah God! that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved that they might tell us
What, and where they be.
It leads me forth at evening,
It lightly winds and steals,
In a cold white robe before me,
When all my spirit reels
At the shouts, the leagues of lights,
And the roaring of the wheels.
* * * * *
Then the broad light glares and beats,
And the sunk eye flits and fleets,
And will not let me be.
I loathe the squares and streets
And the faces that one meets,
Hearts with no love for me.
Always I long to creep
To some still cavern deep,
And to weep and weep and weep
My whole soul out to thee.
