Here is the languid charm of
Spenser, enriched with many classical memories, and pictures of
natural beauty gorgeously yet delicately painted. After the excision
of some verses, rather fantastical, in 1842, the poem became a
flawless masterpiece,--one of the eternal possessions of song.
On the other hand, the opening of The Dream of Fair Women was marred
in 1833 by the grotesque introductory verses about "a man that sails
in a balloon." Young as Tennyson was, these freakish passages are a
psychological marvel in the work of one who did not lack the saving
sense of humour. The poet, wafted on the wing and "pinion that the
Theban eagle bear," cannot conceivably be likened to an aeronaut
waving flags out of a balloon--except in a spirit of self-mockery
which was not Tennyson's. His remarkable self-discipline in excising
the fantastic and superfluous, and reducing his work to its classical
perfection of thought and form, is nowhere more remarkable than in
this magnificent vision. It is probably by mere accidental
coincidence of thought that, in the verses To J. S. (James Spedding),
Tennyson reproduces the noble speech on the warrior's death which Sir
Walter Scott places in the lips of the great Dundee: "It is the
memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of
light that follows the sunken sun, THAT is all that is worth caring
for," the light which lingers eternally on the hills of Atholl.
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