Hearts of Controversy | Page 5

a dreary place, forlorn because an
innocent stag, hunted, had there broken his heart in a leap from the
rocks above; grass would not grow there.
This beast not unobserved by Nature fell, His death was mourned by
sympathy divine.
And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted by the poet to be

these woodland ruins--cruelly, because the daily sight of the world
blossoming over the agonies of beast and bird is made less tolerable to
us by such a fiction.
The Being that is in the clouds and air . . . Maintains a deep and
reverential care For the unoffending creature whom He loves.
The poet offers us as a proof of that "reverential care," the visible
alteration of Nature at the scene of suffering--an alteration we have to
dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask
whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--on
such grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no
more than a fictitious sign and a false proof?
Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack
upon our reason and our heart. He is more serious than the solemn
Wordsworth.
In Memoriam, with all else that Tennyson wrote, tutors, with here and
there a subtle word, this nature-loving nation to perceive land, light,
sky, and ocean, as he perceived. To this we return, upon this we dwell.
He has been to us, firstly, the poet of two geniuses--a small and an
immense; secondly, the modern poet who answered in the negative that
most significant modern question, French or not French? But he was,
before the outset of all our study of him, of all our love of him, the poet
of landscape, and this he is more dearly than pen can describe him. This
eternal character of his is keen in the verse that is winged to meet a
homeward ship with her "dewy decks," and in the sudden island
landscape,
The clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the
kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God.
It is poignant in the garden-night:-
A breeze began to tremble o'er The large leaves of the sycamore, . . .
And gathering freshlier overhead, Rocked the full-foliaged elm, and
swung The heavy-folded rose, and flung The lilies to and fro, and said

"The dawn, the dawn," and died away.
His are the exalted senses that sensual poets know nothing of. I think
the sense of hearing as well as the sense of sight, has never been more
greatly exalted than by Tennyson:-
As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a
great cry.
As to this garden-character so much decried I confess that the "lawn"
does not generally delight me, the word nor the thing. But in
Tennyson's page the word is wonderful, as though it had never been
dull: "The mountain lawn was dewy-dark." It is not that he brings the
mountains too near or ranks them in his own peculiar garden-plot, but
that the word withdraws, withdraws to summits, withdraws into dreams;
the lawn is aloft, alone, and as wild as ancient snow. It is the same with
many another word or phrase changed, by passing into his vocabulary,
into something rich and strange. His own especially is the March
month--his "roaring moon." His is the spirit of the dawning month of
flowers and storms; the golden, soft names of daffodil and crocus are
caught by the gale as you speak them in his verse, in a fine
disproportion with the energy and gloom. His was a new apprehension
of nature, an increase in the number, and not only in the sum, of our
national apprehensions of poetry in nature. Unaware of a separate angel
of modern poetry is he who is insensible to the Tennyson note--the new
note that we reaffirm even with the notes of Vaughan, Traherne,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake well in our ears--the Tennyson note of
splendour, all-distinct. He showed the perpetually transfigured
landscape in transfiguring words. He is the captain of our dreams.
Others have lighted a candle in England, he lit a sun. Through him our
daily suns, and also the backward and historic suns long since set,
which he did not sing, are magnified; and he bestows upon us an
exalted retrospection. Through him Napoleon's sun of Austerlitz rises,
for us, with a more brilliant menace upon arms and the plain; through
him Fielding's "most melancholy sun" lights the dying man to the
setting-forth on that last voyage of his with such an immortal gleam,
denying hope, as would not have lighted, for us, the memory of that

seaward morning, had our poetry not undergone the illumination, the
transcendent