l that a thousand glasses are bursting, a thousand
webs are parting, and that the times are coming eye to eye with the
actual. In those younger days, Tennyson, possessed with a subject, and
as it were floating in it, could pour out a legend with the credulity
of a child and the clear convincing insight of a teacher: when he came
in mature life to apply himself to the rounded work, he had more of a
disposition to teach, and less of that imaginative reach which is
like belief; and _now_ he is telling a story again for the sake of
the story, but without the deeper meaning. Lynette is a supercilious
damsel who asks redress of the knights of the Round Table: Gareth,
a male Cinderella, starts from the kitchen to defend her, and after
conquering her prejudices by his bravery, assumes his place as a
disguised prince. It is a plain little comedy, not much in Tennyson's
line: there are places where he tries to imitate the artless
disconnected speech of youth; and here, as with the little nun's
babble in _Guinevere_, and with some other passages of factitious
simplicity, the poet makes rather queer work:

Gold? said I gold?--ay then, why he, or she,
Or whosoe'er it was, or half the world,
Had ventured--_had_ the thing I spake of been
Mere gold--but this was all of that true steel
Whereof they forged the brand Excalibur,
And lightnings played about it in the storm, etc.

It may be questioned whether hap-hazard talk ever, in any age of human
speech, took a form like that, though it is just like Tennyson in many
a weary part of his poetry. The blank verse, for its part, is broken
with all the old skill, and there are lines of beautiful license, like
this:

Camelot, a city of shadowy palaces,

or strengthened with the extra quantity, like this:

Stay, felon knight, I avenge me for my friend!

or imitating the motion described, as these:

The hoof of his horse slept in the stream, the stream
Descended, and the Sun was washed away;

but occasionally the effort to give variety leads into mere puzzles
and disagreeable fractures of metre, such as the following quatrain:

Courteous or bestial from the moment,
Such as have nor law nor king; and three of these
Proud in their fantasy, call themselves the Day,
Morning-Star, and Noon-Sun, and Evening-Star.

The first line in this quotation, if it be not a misprint of the
American edition, can only be brought to any kind of rule by accenting
each polysyl