and the
latter, which provokes a comparison, not to Tennyson's advantage, with
the fine old ballad, "Helen of Kirkconnell," is a weak thing. The name
Oriana has romantic associations--it is that of the heroine of "Amadis de
Gaul"--but the damnable iteration of it as a ballad burden is irritating.
Mediaeval _motifs_ are rather slightly handled in "The Golden Supper"
(from the "Decameron," 4th novel, 10th day); "The Beggar Maid" (from the
ballad of "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" in the "Reliques"); and
more adequately in "Godiva," a blank-verse rendering of the local legend
of Coventry, in which an attempt is made to preserve something of the
antique roughness under the smooth Vergilian elegance of Tennyson's
diction. "The Day Dream" was a recasting of one of Perrault's fairy
tales, "The Sleeping Beauty," under which title a portion of it had
appeared in the "Poems Chiefly Lyrical" of 1830. Tennyson has written
many greater poems than this, but few in which the special string of
romance vibrates more purely. The tableau of the spellbound palace, with
all its activities suspended, gave opportunity for the display of his
unexampled pictorial power in scenes of still life; and the legend itself
supplied that charmed isolation from the sphere of reality which we
noticed as so important a part of the romantic poet's stock-in-trade in
"Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"--

"The hall-door shuts again and all is still."

Poems like "The Day Dream" and "The Princess" make it evident that Scott
and Coleridge and Keats had so given back the Middle Ages to the
imagination that any future poet, seeking free play in a realm unhampered
by actual conditions--"apart from place, withholding time"--was apt to
turn naturally, if not inevitably, to the feudal times. The action of
"The Day Dream" proceeds no-where and no-when. The garden--if we
cross-examine it--is a Renaissance garden:

"Soft lustre bathes the range of urns
On every slanting terrace-lawn:
The fountain to its place returns,
Deep in the garden lake withdrawn."

The furnishings of the palace are a mixture of mediaeval and Louis
Quatorze--clocks, peacocks, parrots, golden mantle pegs:--

"Till all the hundred summers pass,
The beams that through the oriel shine
Make prisms in every carven glass
And beaker brimm'd with noble wine."

But the impression, as a whole, is of the Middle Age of poetic
convention, if not of history; the e