84). A runaway nun returns
in penitence to her convent, and is met at the gate by the Virgin Mary,
who has taken her likeness and kept her place for her during the years of
her absence. Or read "A New Ballad of Tannhaeuser," [24] which
contradicts "the idea of the inherent impurity of nature" by an
interpretation of the legend in a sense quite the reverse of Wagner's.
Tannhaeuser's dead staff blossoms not as a sign of forgiveness, but to
show him that "there was no need to be forgiven." The modern balladist
attacks the ascetic Middle Age with a shaft from its own quiver.

But it is time to turn from minor poets to acknowledged masters; and
above all to the greatest of modern English artists in verse, the
representative poet of the Victorian era. Is Tennyson to be classed with
the romantics? His workmanship, when most truly characteristic, is
romantic in the sense of being pictorial and ornate, rather than
classically simple or severe. He assimilated the rich manner of Keats,
whose influence is perceptible in his early poems. His art, like Keats',
is eclectic and reminiscent, choosing for its exercise with equal
impartiality whatever was most beautiful in the world of Grecian fable or
the world of mediaeval legend. But unlike Keats, he lived to add new
strings to his lyre; he went on to sing of modern life and thought, of
present-day problems in science and philosophy, of contemporary politics,
the doubt, unrest, passion, and faith of his own century. To find work
of Tennyson's that is romantic throughout, in subject, form, and spirit
alike, we must look among his earlier collections (1830, 1832, 1842).
For this was a phase which he passed beyond, as Millais outgrew his
youthful Pre-Raphaelitism, or as Goethe left behind him his "Goetz" and
"Werther" period and widened out into larger utterance. Mr. Stedman
speaks of the "Gothic feeling" in "The Lady of Shalott," and in ballads
like "Oriana" and "The Sisters," describing them as "work that in its
kind is fully up to the best of those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrest
of development, stop precisely where Tennyson made his second step
forward, and censure him for having gone beyond them." [25] This
estimate may be accepted so far as it concerns "The Lady of Shalott,"
which is known to have worked strongly upon Rossetti's imagination; but
surely "The Sisters" and "Oriana" do not rank with the best
Pre-Raphaelite work. The former is little better than a failure;