own familiar, of heightening the
central feeling by landscape accessories. The level waste, the
stagnant sluices, the neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar,
re-enforce, by their monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless
waiting and weariness of life in the one human figure of the poem. In
_Mariana_, the _Ode to Memory_, and the _Dying Swan_, it was the fens
of Cambridge and of his native Lincolnshire that furnished Tennyson's
scenery.

"Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenched waters run from sky to sky."

A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited a greater scope and
variety, but was still in his earlier manner. The studies of feminine
types were continued in _Margaret_, _Fatima_, _Eleanore_, _Mariana in
the South_, and _A Dream of Fair Women_, suggested by Chaucer's _Legend
of Good {290} Women_. In the _Lady of Shalott_, the poet first touched
the Arthurian legends. The subject is the same as that of _Elaine_, in
the _Idylls of the King_, but the treatment is shadowy, and even
allegorical. In _Oenone_ and the _Lotus Eaters_, he handled Homeric
subjects, but in a romantic fashion, which contrasts markedly with the
style of his later pieces, _Ulysses_ and _Tithonus_. These last have
the true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of
weighty and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general,
Tennyson's art is unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite, not
statuesque, so much as picturesque. He is a great painter, and the
critics complain that in passages calling for movement and action--a
battle, a tournament, or the like--his figures stand still as in a
tableau; and they contrast such passages unfavorably with scenes of the
same kind in Scott, and with Browning's spirited ballad, _How we
brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_. In the _Palace of Art_,
these elaborate pictorial effects were combined with allegory; in the
_Lotus Eaters_, with that expressive treatment of landscape, noted in
_Mariana_; the lotus land, "in which it seemed always afternoon,"
reflecting and promoting the enchanted indolence of the heroes. Two of
the pieces in this 1833 volume, the _May Queen_ and the _Miller's
Daughter_, were Tennyson's first poems of the affections, and as
ballads of simple, rustic life, they anticipated his more perfect idyls
in blank verse, such as _Dora_, the _Brook_, _Edw