ites in the nineteenth century, rarely _of_ it, though, as is
inevitable, he colors his thoughts of long-ago yesterdays with the
colors of to-day. He is not strictly a contemporaneous poet. "Dora,"
"The Gardener's Daughter," and others of the sort, have no time
ear-marks. "The Princess" discusses a living problem, but from the
artistic background of a knightly era. "Locksley Hall," earlier and
later, "Maud" and "In Memoriam" are about the only genuinely
contemporaneous poems. My suggestion is, Tennyson hugs the shadows of
yesterdays; nor need we go far to find the philosophy of this seizure
of the past. Romance gathers in twilights. It is hard to persuade
ourselves that those heroisms which make souls mighty as the gods,
belong to here and now. Imagination fixes this golden age in what
Tennyson would call "the underworld" of time. Greek mythology was the
essential poetry of nature, and mediaevalism the essential poetry of
manhood. Nothing, as appears to me, was more accurate and in keeping
with Tennysonian genius than this choosing Greek antiquity and
mediaevalism as the theater for his poetry; for he was the chief
romance poet since Edmund Spenser. Spenser and Tennyson are the poets
laureate of chivalry. What Spenser did in his age, that Tennyson did
in his. So recall the chronological location of Tennyson's poetry.
"Tithonus," "Oenone," "Ulysses," "Tiresias," "Amphion," "The
Hesperides," "The Merman," "Demeter and Persephone." Do we not seem
rather reading titles from some classic poet than from a poet of the
nineteenth century?

The historical trilogy belongs to the mediaeval centuries; "Harold," "a
Becket," and "Queen Mary" are of yesterday. Tennyson reached backward,
as a child reaches over toward its mother. "Boadicea" belongs to a
still earlier age of English history; and certainly "The Idyls of the
King" "Sir Galahad," "St. Simeon Stylites," "St. Agnes," "The Mystic,"
"Merlin and the Gleam," belong to the romantic, half-hidden era of
history and of thought. "Sir John Oldcastle" and "Columbus" belong to
the visible historic era, while in his wonderful "Rizpah" the poet has
knit the present to dim centuries of the remotest past; and the tragic
"Lucretius" takes us once more into the classic period. To the purely
romantic belong "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," "The
Lotos-Eaters," "The Talking Oak," "A Dream of Fair Women," and
"Godiva." Now subtract these poems and their kin from the bulk