Nor any poor about your lands?
Oh! teach the orphan boy to read,
Or teach the orphan girl to sew,
Pray heaven for a human heart,
And let the foolish yeoman go."
The poems which immediately follow this, The May Queen, and New-Year's Eve, are practical examples of the truth just enunciated—
"A simple maiden in her flower,
Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms."
The natural beauty of The May Queen, and the exquisite pathos of the New-Year's Eve, have made them universally known. In the second volume the poet seems particularly to have endeavored to enforce his ideas of the dignity of a virtuous nature, which stands in its own divine worth, far above all artificial distinctions. His Gardener's Daughter, the ballad of Lady Clara, and that most delightful one of The Lord of Burleigh, all teach it. Lady Godiva is an example of that high devotion to the public good, which is prepared to make the most entire sacrifice of self; and of which history, here and there, amid its mass of selfishness and crime, presents us with some glorious examples—none more glorious than that of the beautiful Godiva. But Locksley Hall and The Two Voices are the most brilliant of all Tennyson's productions, and among the most perfect things in the language.
We can scarcely conceive any thing more perfectly musical and intrinsically poetical than Locksley Hall. It is the soliloquy of a wronged, high, and passionate nature. The speaker, a young man capable of great things, wars against the false maxims of the present time, yet sees how it is advancing into something better and greater. He perceives how mind is moving forward into its destined empire. He feels and makes us feel how great is this age and this England in which we live. Some of the thoughts and expressions stand prominent even amid the superb beauty of the whole, and have never been surpassed in their felicitous truth and pictorial power. The description of his life at that country hall, and the love of himself and his cousin Amy, are fine; but how much finer these stanzas, the result of the fickle cousin marrying a mere clod with a title. The certain consequence of the wife's mind, which would have soared and strengthened in the association with his own, sinking to the level of the brute she had allied herself to, is most admirably told. How constantly do we see this effect in life, but where ever has it been, and in so few words, so fully expressed?