Chapter 10 - Page 2

tries to pluck the bough of gold, it yields reluctantly
(cunctantem), contrary to what the Sibyl has foretold. Mr Conington,
therefore, thought the phrase a slip on the part of Virgil. "People
accused Virgil of plagiarising," he said, "but if a man made it his
own there was no harm in that (look at the great poets, Shakespeare
included)." Tennyson, like Virgil, made much that was ancient his
own; his verses are often, and purposefully, a mosaic of classical
reminiscences. But he was vexed by the hunters after remote and
unconscious resemblances, and far-fetched analogies between his lines
and those of others. He complained that, if he said that the sun
went down, a parallel was at once cited from Homer, or anybody else,
and he used a very powerful phrase to condemn critics who detected
such repetitions. "The moanings of the homeless sea,"--"moanings"
from Horace, "homeless" from Shelley. "As if no one else had ever
heard the sea moan except Horace!" Tennyson's mixture of memory and
forgetfulness was not so strange as that of Scott, and when he
adapted from the Greek, Latin, or Italian, it was of set purpose,
just as it was with Virgil. The beautiful lines comparing a girl's
eyes to bottom agates that seem to

"Wave and float
In crystal currents of clear running seas,"

he invented while bathing in Wales. It was his habit, to note down
in verse such similes from nature, and to use them when he found
occasion. But the higher criticism, analysing the simile, detected
elements from Shakespeare and from Beaumont and Fletcher.

In June 1891 the poet went on a tour in Devonshire, and began his
Akbar, and probably wrote June Bracken and Heather; or perhaps it was
composed when "we often sat on the top of Blackdown to watch the
sunset." He wrote to Mr Kipling -

"The oldest to the youngest singer
That England bore"

(to alter Mr Swinburne's lines to Landor), praising his Flag of
England. Mr Kipling replied as "the private to the general."

Early in 1892 The Foresters was successfully produced at New York by
Miss Ada Rehan, the music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the scenery
from woodland designs by Whymper. Robin Hood (as we learn from Mark
Twain) is a favourite hero with the youth of America. Mr Tom Sawyer
himself took, in Mark Twain's tale, the part of the bold outlaw.

The Death of OEnone was published in 1892, with the dedication to the
Master of Balliol -

"Read a Grecian tale retold
Which, cast in later Grecian mould,
Quintus Calaber
Somewhat lazily handled of old."

Quintus Calaber, more usually called Quintus Smyrnaeus, is a writer
of perhaps the fourth century of our era. About him nothing, or next
to nothing, is known. He told, in so late