Scott, Campbell, and
Byron probably never produced a line with the qualities of this
nonsense verse. "Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy
day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, 'I hear a voice
that's speaking in the wind,' and the words 'far, far away' had
always a strange charm for me." A late lyric has this overword, FAR,
FAR AWAY!
A boy of eight who knew the contemporary poets was more or less
precocious. Tennyson also knew Pope, and wrote hundreds of lines in
Pope's measure. At twelve the boy produced an epic, in Scott's
manner, of some six thousand lines. He "never felt himself more
truly inspired," for the sense of "inspiration" (as the late Mr Myers
has argued in an essay on the "Mechanism of Genius") has little to do
with the actual value of the product. At fourteen Tennyson wrote a
drama in blank verse. A chorus from this play (as one guesses), a
piece from "an unpublished drama written very early," is published in
the volume of 1830:-
"The varied earth, the moving heaven,
The rapid waste of roving sea,
The fountain-pregnant mountains riven
To shapes of wildest anarchy,
By secret fire and midnight storms
That wander round their windy cones."
These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the classical
transcript, "the varied earth," daedala tellus. There is the
geological interest in the forces that shape the hills. There is the
use of the favourite word "windy," and later in the piece -
"The troublous autumn's SALLOW gloom.
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