Chapter 9 - Page 2

son! for more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs
Were strange not mine--and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self
The gain of such large life as match'd with ours
Were Sun to spark--unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world."

The poet's habit of

"Revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself" -

that is, of dwelling on the sound of his own name, was familiar to
the Arabs. M. Lefebure has drawn my attention to a passage in the
works of a mediaeval Arab philosopher, Ibn Khaldoun: {17} "To arrive
at the highest degree of inspiration of which he is capable, the
diviner should have recourse to the use of certain phrases marked by
a peculiar cadence and parallelism. Thus he emancipates his mind
from the influence of the senses, and is enabled to attain an
imperfect contact with the spiritual world." Ibn Khaldoun regards
the "contact" as extremely "imperfect." He describes similar efforts
made by concentrating the gaze on a mirror, a bowl of water, or the
like. Tennyson was doubtless unaware that he had stumbled
accidentally on a method of "ancient sages." Psychologists will
explain his experience by the word "dissociation." It is not
everybody, however, who can thus dissociate himself. The temperament
of genius has often been subject to such influence, as M. Lefebure
has shown in the modern instances of George Sand and Alfred de
Musset: we might add Shelley, Goethe, and even Scott.

The poet's versatility was displayed in the appearance with these
records of "weird seizures", of the Irish dialect piece To-morrow,
the popular Spinster's Sweet-Arts, and the Locksley Hall Sixty Years
After. The old fire of the versification is unabated, but the hero
has relapsed on the gloom of the hero of Maud. He represents
himself, of course, not Tennyson, or only one of the moods of
Tennyson, which were sometimes black enough. A very different mood
chants the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and speaks of

"Green Sussex fading into blue
With one gray glimpse of sea."

The lines To Virgil were written at the request of the Mantuans, by
the most Virgilian of all the successors of the

"Wielder of the stateliest measure
ever moulded by the lips of man."

Never was Tennyson more Virgilian than in this unmatched panegyric,
the sum and flower of criticism of that

"Golden branch amid the shadows,
kings and realms that pass to rise no more."

Hardly less admirable is the tribute to Catullus, and the old