His intellect was thus always
active, even in apparent repose. His eyes rested not from observing,
or his mind from recording and comparing, the beautiful familiar
phenomena of earth and sky. In the matter of the study of books we
have seen how deeply versed he was in certain of the Greek, Roman,
and Italian classics. Mr Jowett writes: "He was what might be
called a good scholar in the university or public-school sense of the
term, . . . yet I seem to remember that he had his favourite
classics, such as Homer, and Pindar, and Theocritus. . . . He was
also a lover of Greek fragments. But I am not sure whether, in later
life, he ever sat down to read consecutively the greatest works of
AEschylus and Sophocles, although he used occasionally to dip into
them." The Greek dramatists, in fact, seem to have affected
Tennyson's work but slightly, while he constantly reminds us of
Virgil, Homer, Theocritus, and even Persius and Horace. Mediaeval
French, whether in poetry or prose, and the poetry of the "Pleiad"
seems to have occupied little of his attention. Into the oriental
literatures he dipped--pretty deeply for his Akbar; and even his
Locksley Hall owed something to Sir William Jones's version of "the
old Arabian Moallakat." The debt appears to be infinitesimal. He
seems to have been less closely familiar with Elizabethan poetry than
might have been expected: a number of his obiter dicta on all kinds
of literary points are recorded in the Life by Mr Palgrave.
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