The success of the first volume of the Idylls recompensed the poet for the slings and arrows that gave Maud a hostile welcome. His next publication was the beautiful Tithonus, a fit pendant to the Ulysses, and composed about the same date (1833-35). "A quarter of a century ago," Tennyson dates it, writing in 1860 to the Duke of Argyll. He had found it when "ferreting among my old books," he said, in search of something for Thackeray, who was establishing the Cornhill Magazine. What must the wealth of the poet have been, who, possessing Tithonus in his portfolio, did not take the trouble to insert it in the volumes of 1842! Nobody knows how many poems of Tennyson's never even saw pen and ink, being composed unwritten, and forgotten. At this time we find him recommending Mr Browning's Men and Women to the Duke, who, like many Tennysonians, does not seem to have been a ready convert to his great contemporary. The Duke and Duchess urged the Laureate to attempt the topic of the Holy Grail, but he was not in the mood. Indeed the vision of the Grail in the early Sir Galahad is doubtless happier than the allegorical handling of a theme so obscure, remote, and difficult, in the Idylls. He wrote his Boadicea, a piece magnificent in itself, but of difficult popular access, owing to the metrical experiment.
In the autumn of 1860 he revisited Cornwall with F. T. Palgrave, Mr Val Prinsep, and Mr Holman Hunt. They walked in the rain, saw Tintagel and the Scilly Isles, and were feted by an enthusiastic captain of a little river steamer, who was more interested in "Mr Tinman and Mr Pancake" than the Celtic boatman of Ardtornish. The winter was passed at Farringford, and the Northern Farmer was written there, a Lincolnshire reminiscence, in the February of 1861. In autumn the Pyrenees were visited by Tennyson in company with Arthur Clough and Mr Dakyns of Clifton College. At Cauteretz in August, and among memories of the old tour with Arthur Hallam, was written All along the Valley. The ways, however, in Auvergne were "foul," and the diet "unhappy." The dedication of the Idylls was written on the death of the Prince Consort in December, and in January 1862 the Ode for the opening of an exhibition. The poet was busy with his "Fisherman," Enoch Arden. The volume was published in 1864, and Lord Tennyson says it has been, next to In Memoriam, the most popular of his father's works. One would have expected the one volume containing the poems up to 1842 to hold that place. The new book, however, mainly dealt with English, contemporary, and domestic themes--"the poetry of the affections." An old woman, a district visitor reported, regarded Enoch Arden as "more beautiful" than the other tracts which were read to her. It is indeed a tender and touching tale, based on a folk-story which Tennyson found current in Brittany as well as in England. Nor is the unseen and unknown landscape of the tropic isle less happily created by the poet's imagination than the familiar English cliffs and hazel copses:-"The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The lustre of the long convolvuluses That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail:
No sail from day to day, but every day The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices;The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail."Aylmer's Field somewhat recalls the burden of Maud, the curse of purse-proud wealth, but is too gloomy to be a fair specimen of Tennyson's art. In Sea Dreams (first published in 1860) the awful vision of crumbling faiths is somewhat out of harmony with its environment:-"But round the North, a light, A belt, it seem'd, of luminous vapour, lay, And ever in it a low musical note Swell'd up and died; and, as it swell'd, a ridge Of breaker issued from the belt, and still Grew with the growing note, and when the note Had reach'd a thunderous fulness, on those cliffs Broke, mixt with awful light (the same as that Living within the belt) whereby she saw That all those lines of cliffs were cliffs no more, But huge cathedral fronts of every age, Grave, florid, stern, as far as eye could see, One after one: and then the great ridge drew, Lessening to the lessening music, back, And past into the belt and swell'd again Slowly to music: ever when it broke The statues, king or saint or founder fell;Then from the gaps and chasms of ruin left Came men and women in dark clusters round, Some crying, 'Set them up! they shall not fall!'
And others, 'Let them lie, for they have fall'n.'
And still they strove and wrangled: and she grieved In her strange dream, she knew not why, to find Their wildest wailings never out of tune With that sweet note; and ever as their shrieks Ran highest up the gamut, that great wave Returning, while none mark'd it, on the crowd Broke, mixt with awful light, and show'd their eyes Glaring, and passionate looks, and swept away The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone, To the waste deeps together.