Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1889-08-04

summer came, a summer of all unusual
mellowness and sweetness, one of the rare
golden summers which he loves to describe,
and day by day his strength came back.
Last June he started from his island
home at Freshwater in Lord Brassey's
yacht-the Sunbeam" whose adventures
SO many thousands of readers are familiar
with-and cruised up and down the English
Channel, calling at little glowing seaport
town, full of tamarisk and myrtle, in the
extreme south of Devonshire, whence, as I
hear as write these lines, he has come back
strengthened and wholly himself again.
Length of life to him still May the laurel
which has clustered SO greenly around his
brows for nearly 40 years flourish and bud
there. 1t will be an evil day that sees the
wreath which Tennyson has worn since the
death of Wordsworth descend to any other
head than his.
THE PRINCE OF POETS.
As we looked around us in the Anglo
Saxon world, nay, on the continent of Eu-
rope also, we see no living figure which ap-
proaches that of Tennyson in literary dig
nifty. As long as Victor Hugo was alive, it
was he who, by common consent, held the
scepter of poetry. AT his death it descended
to the younger Englishman. This is per-
haps the moment 70 ask ourselves why Lord
first man OF letters of the present age. In
what does his pre-emInence. consist? To
what qualities OF his mind and work does he
owe it? No question is more difficult to
answer, because the reply depends on
the combination of great number
of wholly intangible forces. Still, an
answer shall be attempted. In the
first place, no pretense is made by the ad-
mirers of Lord Tennyson to claim Tor him
eminence over ALI his contemporaries in in
tellect or knowledge. he is wise and full
of intelligence, but in mere intellectual
capacity or attainment it is probable that
there are many who excel him. This, then,
is not the direction on which his greatness
asserts itself. He has not headed single
moral reform nor inaugurated single
revolution of opinion; he has never pointed
the way to undiscovered regions of thought;
he has never stood on tiptoe to describe new
worlds that his fellows were not tall enough
70 discover ahead. In all these directions
he has been prompt to follow. quick to ap-
prehend, but never himself a pioneer.
Where, then, has his greatness lain?'
1t has lain in the various perfection of his
writing. He has written, on the whole, with
more constant, unwearied and unwearying
excellence than any of his contemporaries.
He has understood that the first business of
an author, and especially an author in
verse, is not to preach, nor to teach, nor to
prophesy, but to write. He has expended
the treasures of his native talent on broad
ening and deepening his own hold upon the
English language, until that has become an
instrument upon which he is able to play
greater variety of melodies to perfection
than any other man.
HIS UNIVERSAL GENIUS.
There have been poets in hisday who sur
passed him id certain directions; who have
commanded deeper insight into human
action, or a louder volume of lyrical sound.
But Tennyson, in his immense patience,
has been universal. He has cultivated all
branches of the art of poetry. He has failed
in none, he has succeeded superlatively in
several. The consequence is that now at
last he covers more ground. rises before us
as q huger and more complicated specimen
of intellectual architecture than any of
those whose spires may for while have
seemed to sparkle above him.
When Tennyson began to write verses,
nearly 20 years ago, the genius of Byron
was in the ascendant. The boyish volume
which his brother Charles and he published
together when they were schoolbovs at
Louth, early in 1927, shows this influence
strongly. Here is a stanza from that inac-
cessible book, which has never been reprinted,
and the few existing copies of which now
fetch fabulous sums when any of them get
into the market:
Then, when the shriekings of the dying
Were heard above the vave
Soul of my soul! I saw thee dying;
/ follow'd thee to save.
The thunder of the brazen prows,
Ger Actium's ocean wrung,
Fame's garland faded from my brows.
Her wreath away flung.
sought, say, heard but thee;
For what to love was victory?
Boys verses these, perhaps, and in fact
the verse is that OF a boy of 16 or IL, yet how
admirable following of the writer then in
fashion.
A little later, in the "Lover's Tale"
which he long atterward reprinted, Tenny-
son showed that he had been reading Shell
lev. In the Poems, chiefly lyrical" of
1880, he was evidently under the influence
of Keats. These three great poets were the
comrades of his early youth, but his real
masters were the ancients; he was deeply
imbued with the spirit OF Horace and Catui-
lus at the, moment when be began to write
poetry seriously. hope 1 am not indis-
Greet il 1 refer to some remarks on this sub
ject which had the privilege of hearing
Lord Tennyson make many years ago, in
the course of which he attributed his pre-
cocious command of metrical language and
fow of measured speech mainly to the
thorough acquaintance which he enjoyed in
early youth with the Odes of Horace. His
father, he told me. insisted on his reciting,
on successive mornings, the whole Of the
four books of the Odes, from "Maacenas
atavis" down without break to "ProgSniem
Veneris canemus." before he would pro-