"
The poem abounds in lines which live in the memory, as in the vernal
description -
"A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime";
and the voice heard in the garden singing
"A passionate ballad gallant and gay,"
as Lovelace's Althea, and the lines on the far-off waving of a white
hand, "betwixt the cloud and the moon." The lyric of
"Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling,"
was a favourite of the poet.
"What birds were these?" he is said to have asked a lady suddenly,
when reading to a silent company.
"Nightingales," suggested a listener, who did not probably remember
any other fowl that is vocal in the dusk.
"No, they were rooks," answered the poet.
"Come into the Garden, Maud," is as fine a love-song as Tennyson ever
wrote, with a triumphant ring, and a soaring exultant note. Then the
poem drops from its height, like a lark shot high in heaven; tragedy
comes, and remorse, and the beautiful interlude of the
"lovely shell,
Small and pure as a pearl."
Then follows the exquisite
"O that 'twere possible,"
and the dull consciousness of the poem of madness, with its dumb
gnawing confusion of pain and wandering memory; the hero being
finally left, in the author's words, "sane but shattered."
Tennyson's letters of the time show that the critics succeeded in
wounding him: it was not a difficult thing to do.
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