Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/66

ductions of his genius, these characteristics are most prominent. They are marked characteristics, as we have seen, of the Elizabethan poets; they are marked, though not the essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself. Under the influences of the nineteenth century, under wholly new conditions of thought and culture, they manifest themselves in Mr. Tennyson’s poetry in a wholly new way. But they are still there. The essential bent of his poetry is towards such expressions as

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars . . .

or

O’er the sun’s bright eye
Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud . . .

or

When the cairn’d mountain was a shadow, sunn’d
The world to peace again . . .

or

The fresh young captains flash’d their glittering teeth,
The huge bush-bearded barons heaved and blew . . .

or

He bared the knotted column of his throat,
The massive square of his heroic breast,
And arms on which the standing muscle sloped
As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it . . .

And this way of speaking is the least plain, the most un-Homeric, which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents his thought to you just as it wells from the source of his mind: Mr. Tennyson carefully distils his thought before he will part with it. Hence