evinced in "Timbuctoo" and in "The Lover's Tale," is indeed wonderful: blank verse being perhaps the most difficult and unmanageable of all measures. The poet having no longer the factitious aid of rhyme, must depend for effect upon the variety of his cadences and pauses. His verse must read like good prose, and yet be without baldness.
This kind of verse Tennyson has since cultivated with great success in many of his smaller idylls, in "The Princess," in the grand Arthurian epic, for such it deserves to be termed, and in "Enoch Arden."
There is no weak Miltonic or Wordsworthian echo in his blank verse: it is all his own, or, indeed, if he ever reminds us of anybody, it is of Shakespeare. Some of his lines hare the true ring of the master.[1]
Although, however, rhyme is, as Milton insisted, no necessary adjunct of good poetry, it may be a very pleasing ornament. Wordsworth notices somewhere in his preface to the "Lyrical Ballads," the exquisite
- ↑ Such, for instance, as those in the "Morte d' Arthur":And still more markedly in "Ulysses" and "Tithonus.""Woe is me!
Authority forgets a dying king,
Laid widow'd of the power in his eye
That bow'd the will."
