A half-disdain

195

Perched on the pouted blossom of her lips;
And Walter nodded at me: • He began,

The rest would follow, each in turn; and so
We forged a sevenfold story. Kind? what kind?
Chimeras, crotchets, Christmas solecisms,

Seven-headed monsters only made to kill

Time by the fire in winter.'

'Kill him now,

The tyrant! kill him in the summer too,'

Said Lilia; Why not now?' the maiden Aunt. 'Why not a summer's as a winter's tale?

A tale for summer as befits the time,

And something it should be to suit the place, - for a hero lies beneath

Heroic

Grave, solemn !'

Walter warped his mouth at this

To something so mock-solemn, that I laughed,
And Lilia woke with sudden-shrilling mirth

195. Blossom of her lips. Cf. Enone 76:

He pressed the blossom of his lips to mine.

Probably suggested by uses of the Greek voos, 'blossom,' 'flower.' Trace the resemblance in this metaphor.

199. Chimeras. Absurd creations of the imagination. Describe the Greek Chimæra. Crotchets. Whimsical inventions. Solecisms. This word is fancifully derived from the fact that the Athenian settlers at Soli, a town in Cilicia, lost the original purity of the Attic dialect. It thus denotes originally an impropriety in language, then, more loosely, any incongruity or inconsistency — here a ridiculous story' (Wallace).

In this line the poet anticipates and deprecates adverse criticism on the incongruities of his story.

204. Winter's tale. Cf. 231.

207-9. Cf. Con. 10-28.

210. Sudden-shrilling. Cf. Madeline 35; Elaine 327. — Shrilling. V. 241; VII. 31.

200

205

210

An echo like a ghostly woodpecker

Hid in the ruins; till the maiden Aunt

(A little sense of wrong had touched her face With color) turned to me with As you will; Heroic if you will, or what you will,

Or be yourself your hero if you will.'

'Take Lilia, then, for heroine,' clamored he, 'And make her some great Princess, six feet high, Grand, epic, homicidal; and be you

The Prince to win her!'

215

'Then follow me, the Prince,' 220

I answered; each be hero in his turn!

Seven and yet one, like shadows in a dream.
Heroic seems our Princess as required;

But something made to suit with time and place,
A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house,

225

A talk of college and of ladies' rights,

A feudal knight in silken masquerade,

And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments

For which the good Sir Ralph had burnt them all —
These were a medley! we should have him back

230

211. Bayard Taylor criticises warped and sudden-shrilling. He says: 'I italicize expressions which are simply unusual — original by force of will not happy, nor agreeable. It is quite impossible to imagine laughter the echo of which sounds like a ghostly woodpecker!' In Kate, a poem of the volume of 1833, Tennyson had written: As laughters of the woodpecker.' The first four editions of The Princess have April instead of ghostly.

218. Six feet high. Compare what is said of Arac, V. 244-8, 264.

222. Dream. Again a way of deprecating criticism on improbabilities. The word appears twenty times as a noun in The Princess. 225-8. Cf. 11, 70, 92, 103, 127 ff.

229. Had burnt them all. Why?

230. Were. Parse. - Medley. What is the full title of the poem ?

Who told the Winter's Tale' to do it for us.
No matter; we will say whatever comes.
And let the ladies sing us, if they will,

From time to time, some ballad or a song
To give us breathing-space.'

So I began,

And the rest followed; and the women sang
Between the rougher voices of the men,
Like linnets in the pauses of the wind;

And here I give the story and the songs.

231. Winter's Tale. Have you read it? Compare note on I. 134, the latter part.

233-8. Added in the third edition, with the six songs.

236. The women sang. 'The songs, like the little child, breathe of motherhood, wifehood, love; of that love which is the poet's best solution of the problem he undertook to solve' (Luce, Handbook to Tennyson's Works, p. 245).

238. In the pauses of the wind.

The Miller's Daughter 122-3:

And, in the pauses of the wind,

Sometimes I heard you sing within.

But Shelley had already said (Letter to Maria Gisborne):

The murmur of the awakening sea doth fill

The empty pauses of the blast.

Hallam Tennyson says: 'It may be remarked that there is scarcely anything in the story which is not prophetically glanced at in the Prologue' (Wallace).

Compare the Prologue with the Conclusion, and try to form a judgment of why they were provided. Would not the story have been as acceptable without them? There must be some reason why the poet thought them necessary, for we have a fragment of his conversation reported in the Nineteenth Century (XXXIII. 173), by its editor, Knowles, to this effect: "It is necessary to respect the limits," he said; "an artist is one who recognizes bounds to his work as a necessity, and does not overflow illimitably to all extent about a matter. I soon found that if I meant to make any mark at all it must be by shortness, for all the men before me had been

235

so diffuse, and all the big things had been done. To get the workmanship as nearly perfect as possible is the best chance for going down the stream of time. A small vessel on fine lines is likely to float farther than a great raft.” '

He must have carefully considered everything, so far as was possible at the time, for we are told by Jennings (Lord Tennyson, p. 115) While the poem was passing through the press he subjected it to such minute revision that Mr. Moxon regarded him, says Miss Mitford, as "a great torment, keeping proofs a fortnight to alter, and then sending for revises." Was such careful workmanship of advantage to the poem? Cf. pp. xxii, xxxi.

I.

A PRINCE I was, blue-eyed, and fair in face,
Of temper amorous, as the first of May,
With lengths of yellow ringlet, like a girl,
For on my cradle shone the Northern star.

There lived an ancient legend in our house.
Some sorcerer, whom a far-off grandsire burnt
Because he cast no shadow, had foretold,
Dying, that none of all our blood should know
The shadow from the substance, and that one
Should come to fight with shadows and to fall.
For so, my mother said, the story ran.

And, truly, waking dreams were, more or less,
An old and strange affection of the house.
Myself too had weird seizures, Heaven knows what:

3. Yellow ringlet. Cf. 38.

4. Wallace says: This periphrasis is very characteristic of the poet's genius. The bald meaning is: "For I am a native of a northern country," but the form of the expression in the text, besides embodying an idea picturesque in itself, has also a distant reference to the old astrology, which taught that the various planets guided the fortunes of those who were born under their respective influences.'

6. Burnt. Cf. Prol. 229.

66

7. Cast no shadow. Like Peter Schlemihl, in Chamisso's tale. 14. Weird seizures. The weird seizures," the "haunting sense of hollow shows," is a trait added to the character of the Prince in the edition of 1851. And the poet meant it to emphasize the part played by Nature in subduing the Princess; also to make the Prince less heroic, and to serve as an apology for his being so; to serve also as an apology for the character of the whole poem; and more especially to make the work of redemption set apart for the

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IO