nchanted dateless era of romance and
fairy legend.

"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," its masculine counterpart, sound the old
Catholic notes of saintly virginity and mystical, religious rapture, the
_Gottesminne_ of mediaeval hymnody. Not since Southwell's "Burning Babe"
and Crashaw's "Saint Theresa" had any English poet given such expression
to those fervid devotional moods which Sir Thomas Browne describes as
"Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction,
transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God and ingression
into the divine shadow." This vein, we have noticed, is wanting in
Scott. On the other hand, it may be noticed in passing, Tennyson's
attitude towards nature is less exclusively romantic--in the narrow
sense--than Scott's. He, too, is conscious of the historic associations
of place. In Tennyson, as in Scott,--

"The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story"--[26]

but, in general, his treatment of landscape, in its human relations, is
subtler and more intimate.

"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad" are monologues, but lyric and not dramatic
in Browning's manner. There is a dramatic falsity, indeed, in making Sir
Galahad say of himself--

"My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure,"

and the poem would be better in the third person. "St. Simeon Stylites"
is a dramatic monologue more upon Browning's model, _i.e._, a piece of
apologetics and self-analysis. But in this province Tennyson is greatly
Browning's inferior.

"The Princess" (1847) is representative of that "splendid composite of
imagery," and that application of modern ideas to legendary material, or
to invented material arbitrarily placed in an archaic setting, which are
characteristic of this artist. The poem's sub-title is "A Medley,"
because it is

"--made to suit with time and place,
A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house,
A talk of college and of ladies' rights,
A feudal knight in silken masquerade,
And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments."

The problem is a modern one--the New Woman. No precise historic period
is indicated. The female university is full of classic lore and art, but
withal there are courts of feudal kings, with barons, knights, and
squires, and shock of armoured champions in the lists.

But the special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry lay in his being
the first to give a worthy form to the great Arthurian saga;