“Then Sir Bedivere cried: ’Ah,
my Lord Arthur, what shall become of me
now ye go from me and leave me here alone
among mine enemies?’
‘Comfort thyself,’ said the
king, ’and do as well as thou mayest, for in
me is no trust to trust in. For I will unto the
vale of Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound.
And if thou never hear more of me, pray for my soul.’”]
[Footnote 14: With this ’cf>/i>. Greene,
’James IV’., v., 4:—
“Should all things still remain
in one estate
Should not in greatest arts some scars
be found
Were all upright nor chang’d what
world were this?
A chaos made of quiet, yet no world.”
And ‘cf’. Shakespeare,
‘Coriolanus’, ii., iii.:—
What custom wills in all things should
we do it,
The dust on antique Time would be unswept,
And mountainous error too highly heaped
For Truth to overpeer.]
[Footnote 15: ‘Cf.’ Archdeacon
Hare’s “Sermon on the Law of Self-Sacrifice”.
“This is the golden chain of love
whereby the whole creation is bound
to the throne of the Creator.”
For further illustrations see ‘Illust. of Tennyson’,
p. 158.]
[Footnote 16: Paraphrased from ‘Odyssey’,
vi., 42-5, or ‘Lucretius’, iii., 18-22.]
[Footnote 17: The expression “‘crowned’
with summer ‘sea’” from ‘Odyssey’,
x., 195: [Greek: naeson taen peri pontos
apeiritos estaphan_otai.]]
In the ‘Gardener’s Daughter’ we
have the first of that delightful series of poems
dealing with scenes and characters from ordinary English
life, and named appropriately ‘English Idylls’.
The originator of this species of poetry in England
was Southey, in his ‘English Eclogues’,
written before 1799. In the preface to these
eclogues, which are in blank verse, Southey says:
“The following eclogues, I believe, bear no resemblance
to any poems in our language. This species of
composition has become popular in Germany, and I was
induced to attempt it by an account of the German
idylls given me in conversation.” Southey’s
eclogues are eight in number: ‘The Old
Mansion House’, ‘The Grandmother’s
Tale’, ‘Hannah’, ‘The Sailor’s
Mother’, ‘The Witch’, ‘The
Ruined Cottage’, ’The Last of the Family’
and ‘The Alderman’s Funeral’.
Southey was followed by Wordsworth in ‘The Brothers’
and ‘Michael’. Southey has nothing
of the charm, grace and classical finish of his disciple,
but how nearly Tennyson follows him, as copy and model,
may be seen by anyone who compares Tennyson’s
studies with ‘The Ruined Cottage’.
But Tennyson’s real master was Theocritus, whose
influence pervades these poems not so much directly
in definite imitation as indirectly in colour and tone.
