All
tutors cannot be, and at that time few dreamed of being, men like
Jowett and T. H. Green, Gamaliels at whose feet undergraduates sat
with enthusiasm, "did EAGERLY frequent," like Omar Khayyam. In later
years Tennyson found closer relations between dons and
undergraduates, and recorded his affection for his university. She
had supplied him with such companionship as is rare, and permitted
him to "catch the blossom of the flying terms," even if tutors and
lecturers were creatures of routine, terriblement enfonces dans la
matiere, like the sire of Madelon and Cathos, that honourable
citizen.
Tennyson just missed, by going down, a visit of Wordsworth to
Cambridge. The old enthusiast of revolution was justifying passive
obedience: thirty years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost
Jacobite. Such is the triumph of time. In the summer of 1830
Tennyson, with Hallam, visited the Pyrenees. The purpose was
political--to aid some Spanish rebels. The fruit is seen in OEnone
and Mariana in the South.
In March 1831 Tennyson lost his father. "He slept in the dead man's
bed, earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came." "You
see," he said, "ghosts do not generally come to imaginative people;"
a remark very true, though ghosts are attributed to "imagination."
Whatever causes these phantasms, it is not the kind of phantasia
which is consciously exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far
too many ghosts to believe in them; and Coleridge and Donne apart,
with the hallucinations of Goethe and Shelley, who met themselves,
what poet ever did "see a ghost"? One who saw Tennyson as he
wandered alone at this period called him "a mysterious being,
seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a power of
intercourse with the spirit world not granted to others.
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