3

What hope or fear or joy is thine?
Who talketh with thee, Adeline?
For sure thou art not all alone:

Do beating hearts of salient springs
Keep measure with thine own?

Hast thou heard the butterflies
What they say betwixt their wings?
Or in stillest evenings

With what voice the violet woos
To his heart the silver dews?
Or when little airs arise,
How the merry bluebell ringsl
To the mosses underneath?

Hast thou look'd upon the breath
Of the lilies at sunrise?

Wherefore that faint smile of thine,
Shadowy, dreaming Adeline?

4

Some honey-converse feeds thy mind,
Some spirit of a crimson rose

In love with thee forgets to close
His curtains, wasting odorous sighs
All night long on darkness blind.

What aileth thee? whom waitest thou
With thy soften'd, shadowed brow,

And those dew-lit eyes of thine,2
Thou faint smiler, Adeline?

5

Lovest thou the doleful wind

When thou gazest at the skies?

Doth the low-tongued Orient 3

Wander from the side of the morn,

Dripping with Sabæan spice

1 This conceit seems to have been borrowed from Shelley, Sensitive Plant, \. :— And the hyacinth, purple and white and blue,

Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew

Of music.

2 Cj. Collins, Ode to Pity, "and eyes of dewy light".

3 What

44

the low-tongued Orient " may mean I cannot explain.

41830 and all editions till 1853. O'.

On thy pillow, lowly bent

With melodious airs lovelorn,
Breathing Light against thy face,
While his locks a-dropping J twined
Round thy neck in subtle ring
Make a carcanet of rays,2

And ye talk together still,
In the language wherewith Spring
Letters cowslips on the hill?
Hence that look and smile of thine,
Spiritual Adeline.

A CHARACTER

First printed in 1830.

The only authoritative light thrown on the person here described is what the present Lord Tennyson gives, who tells us that "the then well-known Cambridge orator S― was partly described". He was "a very plausible, parliament-like, self-satisfied speaker at the Union Debating Society". The character reminds us of Wordsworth's Moralist. See Poet's Epitaph:—

One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling,

Nor form nor feeling, great nor small;

A reasoning, self-sufficient thing,

An intellectual all in all.

Shakespeare's fop, too (Hotspur's speech, Henry IV., i., i., 2), seems to have suggested a touch or two.

With a half-glance upon the sky
At night he said, "The wanderings
Of this most intricate Universe
Teach me the nothingness of things".
Yet could not all creation pierce
Beyond the bottom of his eye.

He spake of beauty: that the dull

Saw no divinity in grass,

Life in dead stones, or spirit in air;

Then looking as 'twere in a glass,

He smoothed his chin and sleek'd his hair,

And said the earth was beautiful.

11863. A-drooping.

2 A carcanet is a necklace, diminutive from old French "Carcan". Cf. Comedy

of Errors, iii., i, "To see the making of her Carcanet".

He spike of virtue: not the gods
More purely, when they wish to charm
Pallas and Juno sitting by:

And with a sweeping of the arm,
And a lack-lustre dead-blue eye,
Devolved his rounded periods.

Most delicately hour by hour
He canvass'd human mysteries,
And trod on silk, as if the winds
Blew his own praises in his eyes,
And stood aloof from other minds
In impotence of fancied power.

With lips depress'd as he were meek,
Himself unto himself he sold :
Upon himself himself did feed:
Quiet, dispassionate, and cold,

And other than his form of creed,

With chisell'd features clear and sleek.

THE POET

First printed in 1830.

In this poem we have the first grand note struck by Tennyson, the first poem exhibiting the σrovdaιórns of the true poet.

The poet in a golden clime was born,

With golden stars above;

Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,1

The love of love.

He saw thro' 2 life and death, thro' 2 good and ill,
He saw thro' 2 his own soul.

The marvel of the everlasting will,

An open scroll,

1 The expression, as is not uncommon with Tennyson, is extremely ambiguous; it may mean that he hated hatred, scorned scorn, and loved love, or that he had hatred, scorn and love as it were in quintessence, like Dante, and that is no doubt the meaning.

21830. Through.

Before him lay: with echoing feet he threaded
The secretest walks of fame :

The viewless arrows of his thoughts were headed
And wing'd with flame,

Like Indian reeds blown from his silver tongue,
And of so fierce a flight,

From Calpe unto Caucasus they sung,
Filling with light

And vagrant melodies the winds which bore
Them earthward till they lit ;

Then, like the arrow-seeds of the field flower,
The fruitful wit

Cleaving, took root, and springing forth anew
Where'er they fell, behold,

Like to the mother plant in semblance, grew
A flower all gold,

And bravely furnish'd all abroad to fling
The winged shafts of truth,

To throng with stately blooms the breathing spring
Of Hope and Youth.

So many minds did gird their orbs with beams,

Tho'1 one did fling the fire.

Heaven flow'd upon the soul in

Of high desire.

many dreams

Thus truth was multiplied on truth, the world
Like one 2 great garden show'd,

And thro' the wreaths of floating dark upcurl'd,
Rare sunrise flow'd.

And Freedom rear'd in that august sunrise
Her beautiful bold brow,

When rites and forms before his burning eyes
Melted like snow.

1 1830 till 1851. Though.

2 1830. A.

There was no blood upon her maiden robes
Sunn'd by those orient skies;

But round about the circles of the globes
Of her keen eyes

And in her raiment's hem was traced in flame
Wisdom, a name to shake

All evil dreams of power—a sacred name.1
And when she spake,

Her words did gather thunder as they ran,
And as the lightning to the thunder
Which follows it, riving the spirit of man,
Making earth wonder,

So was their meaning to her words.

Of wrath her right arm whirl'd, 2

No sword

But one poor poet's scroll, and with hit word
She shook the world.

THE POET'S MIND

First published in 1830. A companion poem to the preceding.

After line 7 in 1830 appears this stanza, afterwards omitted:—
Clear as summer mountain streams,
Bright as the inwoven beams,

Which beneath their crisping sapphire

In the midday, floating o'er

The golden sands, make evermore
To a blossom-starred shore.

11830. And in the bordure of her robe was writ

Wisdom, a name to shake

Hoar anarchies, as with a thunderfit.

21830. Hurled.