and Girl:

Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.

These quotations are enough to show what a width of view is given to
modern Romantic poetry. Man is, in one sense, more truly seen in a wide
setting of the mountains and the sea than close at hand in the street.
But the romantic effect of distance may delude and conceal as well as
glorify and liberate. The weakness of the modern Romantic poet is that
he must keep himself aloof from life, that he may see it. He rejects the
authority, and many of the pleasures, along with the duties, of society.
He looks out from his window on the men fighting in the plain, and sees
them transfigured under the rays of the setting sun. He enjoys the
battle, but not as the fighters enjoy it. He nurses himself in all the
luxury of philosophic sensation. He does not help to bury the child, or
to navigate the schooner, or to discover the Fortunate Islands. The
business of every poet, it may be said, is vision, not action. But the
epic poet holds his reader fast by strong moral bonds of sympathy with
the actors in the poem. "I should have liked to do that" is what the
reader says to himself. He is asked to think and feel as a man, not as a
god.

The weakness of revived Romance found the most searching of its critics
in Tennyson, who was fascinated, when he was shaping his own poetic
career, by the picture and the past, yet could not feel satisfied with
the purely aesthetic attitude of art to life. In poem after poem he
returns to the question, Is poetry an escape from life? Must it lull the
soul in a selfish security? The struggle that went on in his mind has
left its mark on _The Lady of Shalott_, _The Palace of Art_, _The
Voyage_, _The Vision of Sin_, _The Lotos-Eaters_, and others of his
poems. The Lady of Shalott lives secluded in her bower, where she weaves
a magic web with gay colors. She has heard that a curse will fall on her
if she looks out on the world and down to the city of Camelot. She sees
the outer world only in a mirror, and

In her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights

--villages, market-girls, knights riding two and two, funerals, or pairs
of lovers wandering by. At last she grows half-sick of seeing the world
only in shadows and reflections. Then a sudden vivid experience breaks
up this life of dream. Sir Lancelot rides