From all these sources Tennyson took what he could make his own, and used it to enrich his verse. The gold thus gathered was not all new-mined; some of it had passed through other hands; but it was all new-minted, fused in his imagination and fashioned into forms bearing the mark of his own genius. My object in the present writing is to give some idea of the way in which he collected his material and the method by which he wrought it into poetry.

(1.) With nature Tennyson dealt at first hand. A sensitive, patient, joyful observer, he watched the clouds, the waters, the trees, the flowers, the birds, for new disclosures of their beauty, new suggestions of their symbolic relation to the life of man. In a letter written to Mr. Dawson of Montreal, commenting upon the statement that certain lines of natural description in his work were suggested by something in Wordsworth or Shelley, he demurs, with perceptible warmth, and goes on to say: "There was a period in my life when, as an artist, Turner for instance, takes rough sketches of landskip, etc., in order to work them eventually into some great picture, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike me as picturesque in nature. I never put these down, and many and many a line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain." Then he gives some illustrations, among them,

A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight,

which was suggested by a night at Torquay, when the sky was covered with thin vapour. The line was afterwards embodied

in The Princess, i, 244.

But in saying that he never wrote these observations down, the poet misremembers his own custom; for his note-books contain many luminous fragments of recorded vision, like the following:

(Babbicombe.) Like serpent-coils upon the deep.

(Bonchurch.) A little salt pool fluttering round a stone upon the

shore. ("Guinevere,” 1. 50.)

(The river Shannon, on the rapids.) Ledges of battling water. (Cornwall.) Sea purple and green like a peacock's neck. (See “The Daisy,” p. 32.)

(Voyage to Norway.) One great wave, green-shining past with all its crests smoking high up beside the vessel.

This last passage is transformed, in "Lancelot and Elaine," into a splendid simile :

They couch'd their spears and prick'd their steeds, and thus,
Their plumes driv'n backward by the wind they made

In moving, all together down upon him

Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North-sea,
Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all
Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies,
Down on a bark, and overbears the bark,

And him that helms it, so they overbore
Sir Lancelot and his charger.

Tennyson was always fond of travel, and from all his journeys he brought back jewels which we find embedded here and there in his verse. The echoes in "The Bugle Song" (p. 9), were heard on the Lakes of Killarney in 1842. The Silver Horns of the Alps and the "wreaths of dangling water-smoke," in the "small sweet idyl" from The Princess (p. 14), were seen at Lauterbrunnen in 1846. In "Enone" (p. 107),

My tall dark pines that plumed the craggy ledge
High over the blue gorge, and all between

The snowy peak and snow-white cataract,

were sketched in the Pyrenees in 1830. In the first edition of the poem he brought in a beautiful species of cicala, with scarlet wings, which he saw on his Spanish journey; though

he was conscientious enough to add a footnote explaining that "probably nothing of the kind exists in Mount Ida."

It is true that in later editions he let the cicala and the note go; but this example will serve to illustrate the defect, or at least the danger, which attends Tennyson's method of working up his pictures. There is a temptation to introduce too many details from the remembered or recorded "rough sketches," to crowd the canvas, to use bits of description which, however beautiful in themselves, do not always add to the strength of the picture, and sometimes even give it an air of distracting splendour. Ornateness is a fault from which Tennyson is not free. In spite of his careful revision there are still some red-winged cicalas left in his verse. There are

passages in The Princess, in "Enoch Arden," and in some of the Idylls of the King, for example, which are bewildering in their opulence.

But on the other hand it must be said that very often this richness of detail is precisely the effect which he wishes to produce, and in certain poems, like "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" (p. 27), "The Lotos-Eaters" (p. 42), and "The Palace of Art" (p. 221), it enhances the mystical, dream-like atmosphere in which the subject is conceived. If he sometimes puts in too many touches, he seldom, if ever, makes use of any that is not in harmony with the fundamental tone, the colour-key of his picture. Notice the accumulation of dark images of loneliness and desertion in "Mariana" (p. 50), the cold, gray sadness and weariness of the landscape in "The Dying Swan" (p. 38), and the serene rapture that clothes the earth with emerald and the sea with sapphire in the song of triumphant love in Maud, I, xviii (p. 159).

There are passages in Tennyson's verse where his direct vision of nature is illumined by his memory of the things that other poets have written when looking at the same scene.

Thus "Frater Ave atque Vale" (p. 237) is filled, as it should be, with touches from Catullus. But how delicate is the art with which they are blended and harmonized, how exquisite the shimmer of the argent-leaved orchards which Tennyson adds in the last line,

Sweet Catullus's all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio!

In "The Daisy" (a series of pictures from an Italian journey made with his wife in 1851, recalled to the poet's memory by finding, between the leaves of a book which he was reading in Edinburgh, a daisy plucked on the Splügen Pass), we find literary and historical reminiscences interwoven with descriptions. At Cogoletto he remembers the young Columbus who was born there. On Lake Como, which Virgil praised in the Georgics, he recalls

The rich Virgilian rustic measure
Of Lari Maxume, all the way.

At Varenna the story of Queen Theodolind comes back to him. There are critics who profess to regard such allusions and reminiscences as indicating a lack of originality in a poet. But why? Tennyson saw Italy not with the eyes of a peasant, but with the enlarged and sensitive vision of a scholar. The associations of the past entered into his perception of the spirit of place. New colours glowed on

tower, or high hill-convent, seen
A light amid its olives green;

Or olive-hoary cape in ocean;
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine,

because he remembered the great things that had been done and suffered in the land through which he was passing. Is not the landscape of imagination as real as the landscape of optics? Must a man be ignorant in order to be original ?

Is true poetry possible only to him who looks at nature with a mind as bare as if he had never opened a book? Milton did not think so.

Tennyson's use of nature as the great source of poetic images and figures was for the most part immediate and direct; but often his vision was quickened and broadened by memories of what the great poets had seen and sung. Yet when he borrowed, here and there, a phrase, an epithet, from one of them, it was never done blindly or carelessly. He always verified his references to nature. The phrase borrowed is sure to be a true one, chosen with a delicate feeling for the best, translated with unfailing skill, and enhanced in beauty and significance by the setting which he gave to it.

(2.) For subjects, plots, and illustrations Tennyson turned often to the literature of the past. His range of reading, even in boyhood, was wide and various, as the notes to Poems by Two Brothers show. At the University he was not only a close student of the Greek and Latin classics, but a diligent reader of the English poets and philosophers, and a fair Italian scholar. In the years after he left college we find him studying Spanish and German. In later life he kept up his studies with undiminished ardour. In 1854 he was learning Persian, translating Homer and Virgil to his wife, and reading Dante with her. In 1867 he was working over Job, The Song of Solomon and Genesis, in Hebrew. He takes the themes of "The Lotos-Eaters" and "The Sea-Fairies" from Homer; "The Death of Enone" from Quintus Calaber; "Tiresias from Euripides; "Tithonus" from an Homeric Hymn; "Demeter" and "Enone" from Ovid; "Lucretius" from St. Jerome; "St. Simeon Stylites" and "St. Telemachus" from Theodoret; "The Cup" from Plutarch; "A Dream of Fair Women" from Chaucer; "Mariana" from Shakespeare; "The Lover's Tale" and "The Falcon" from Boccaccio ;