Chapter 2 - Page 2

as she was. The original conclusion was distressing; we were dropped
from the airs of mysterious romance:-

"They crossed themselves, their stars they blest,
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest;
There lay a parchment on her breast,
That puzzled more than all the rest
The well-fed wits at Camelot."

Hitherto we have been "puzzled," but as with the sublime incoherences
of a dream. Now we meet well-fed wits, who say, "Bless my stars!" as
perhaps we should also have done in the circumstances--a dead lady
arriving, in a very cold east wind, alone in a boat, for "her blood
was frozen slowly," as was natural, granting the weather and the
lady's airy costume. It is certainly matter of surprise that the
young poet's vision broke up in this humorous manner. And, after
all, it is less surprising that the Scorpion, finding such matter in
a new little book by a new young man, was more sensitive to the
absurdity than to the romance. But no lover of poetry should have
been blind to the almost flawless excellence of Mariana in the South,
inspired by the landscape of the Provencal tour with Arthur Hallam.
In consequence of Lockhart's censures, or in deference to the maturer
taste of the poet, The Miller's Daughter was greatly altered before
1842. It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of
Tennyson's domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties,
but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on
whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The seventh
stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to
bring in "minnows" where "fish" had been the reading, and where
"trout" would best recall an English chalk stream. To the angler the
rising trout, which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as the
"reflex of a beauteous form." "Every woman seems an angel at the
water-side," said "that good old angler, now with God," Thomas Todd
Stoddart, and so "the long and listless boy" found it to be. It is
no wonder that the mother was "SLOWLY brought to yield consent to my
desire." The domestic affections, in fact, do not adapt themselves
so well to poetry as the passion, unique in Tennyson, of Fatima. The
critics who hunt for parallels or plagiarisms will note -

"O Love, O fire! once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul thro'
My lips,"

and will observe Mr Browning's

"Once he kissed
My soul out in a fiery mist."

As to OEnone, the scenery of that earliest of the classical idylls is
borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallam. "It is possible
that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie's Judgment of
Paris," says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which

"Quintus Calaber