d one still
unexhausted, although it has been examined by Mr. Panizzi and M.
Fauriel,[1] but one which is quite beyond the scope of our present
subject.

[1] Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians: London,
1830. Histoire de la Poesie Provencale: Paris, 1846.

It is to this rich repository that Mr. Tennyson has resorted for his
material. He has shown, as we think, rare judgment in the choice. The
Arthurian Romance has every recommendation that should win its way to
the homage of a great poet. It is national: it is Christian. It is also
human in the largest and deepest sense; and, therefore, though highly
national, it is universal; for it rests upon those depths and breadths
of our nature to which all its truly great developments in all nations
are alike essentially and closely related. The distance is enough for
atmosphere, not too much for detail; enough for romance, not too much
for sympathy. A poet of the nineteenth century, the Laureate has adopted
characters, incidents, and even language in the main, instead of
attempting to project them on a basis of his own in the region of
illimitable fancy. But he has done much more than this. Evidently by
reading and by deep meditation, as well as by sheer force of genius, he
has penetrated himself down to the very core of his being, with all that
is deepest and best in the spirit of the time, or the representation,
with which he deals; and as others, using old materials, have been free
to alter them in the sense of vulgarity or licence, so he has claimed
and used the right to sever and recombine, to enlarge, retrench, and
modify, for the purposes at once of a more powerful and elaborate art
than his original presents, and of a yet more elevated, or at least of a
far more sustained, ethical and Christian strain.

We are rather disposed to quarrel with the title of Idylls: for no
diminutive ([Greek: _eidullion_]) can be adequate to the breadth,
vigour, and majesty which belong to the subjects, as well as to the
execution, of the volume. The poet used the name once before; but he
then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their
delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are
yet like the disjoined figures from the pediment of the Parthenon in
their dignity and force. One indeed among Mr. Tennyson's merits is, that
he does not think it necessary to keep himself aloft by artificial
effort, but undulates with his matter,