"
Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the
Odyssey -
"Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow."
"Softly through the flutes of the Grecians" came first these Elysian
numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyson's own
Lucretius, then in Mr Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon:-
"Lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of west
Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea
Rolls without wind for ever, and the snow
There shows not her white wings and windy feet,
Nor thunder nor swift rain saith anything,
Nor the sun burns, but all things rest and thrive."
So fortunate in their transmission through poets have been the lines
of "the Ionian father of the rest," the greatest of them all.
In the variety of excellences which marks Tennyson, the new English
idylls of 1842 hold their prominent place. Nothing can be more
exquisite and more English than the picture of "the garden that I
love." Theocritus cannot be surpassed; but the idyll matches to the
seventh of his, where it is most closely followed, and possesses such
a picture of a girl as the Sicilian never tried to paint.
Dora is another idyll, resembling the work of a Wordsworth in a clime
softer than that of the Fells. The lays of Edwin Morris and Edward
Bull are not among the more enduring of even the playful poems. The
St Simeon Stylites appears "made to the hand" of the author of Men
and Women rather than of Tennyson.
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