Mary Baldwin College - Bluestocking Yearbook (Staunton, VA)

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Mi El The Augusta Seminary Amuial. 11. ' ' Not of the howling dervishes of song, Who craze the brain with their delirious song, Art thou, O sweet historian of the heart. Therefore to thee, the laurel leaves belong, To thee our love and our allegiance. For thy allegiance to the poet ' s art. ENNYSON is by emminence the representative poet of J the recent era. Not, like one or another of his com- peers, representative of the melody, wisdom, passion, or other partial phase of the era, but of the time itself, with its diverse elements in harmonious conjunction. By the weight of his thought and the richness of his poetic expression, he has given delight to the reading world of his day and has won our gratitude as a purifier and guardian of the language. He has gleaned from all nature and all history what was most lofty and aim- iable. Not unfrequently he rises to the Shakespearian level in the beauty and picturesqueness of his expression, but he does not possess that wild forest-like freedom which so charcterizes the great master. Tennyson ' s command of English is wonderful. He com- bined old words into new epithets, he daringly mingled all col- ors to bring out tints that never were on sea or shore. His words gleam like pearls and opals, like rubies and emeralds. The stern vocables of the English language under the power of his imagination became gracefully brilliant as the leopards of Bacchus soft and glowing as the Cytherean doves. No finer group of songs has heen produced in this centurj ' than the melodies, Sweet and Eow. The splendor falls on castle walls, and Ask me no more. Not one of the blank verse songs, in his Arthurian epic, equals in structure or depth of feeling, Tears, idle tears, and O swallow, swallow, flying, flying south! What witchery of landscape and action; what fair women and brave men! The distinctive character of In Memoriam is deter- mined b} its having been composed, not within the compass of a few weeks, expressly in honor of a deceased friend, like Mil- ton ' s Lycidas and Shelley ' s Adonais, but during a number of years and apparently without being designed as a single poem.

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The Augusta Seminary Annual. 3 Ages, for in them were pictured the strong who defended the weak and oppressed, the women who were loved with a faithful and unswerving devotion and men who led pure lives and served conscience and king. In the instances of sin — and there were those even in these mythical stories — evil is shown in its true light and its debasing effect on the character is revealed. As to the influence on literature, we find other stories, whose heroes are possessed of the same virtues attributed to Arthur, showing how his character — the highest ideal of chivalric times — had permeated the minds of the people. In 1 147 the legends were collected, revised and enlarged upon by a Welsh priest nam- ed Geoffrey of Monmouth. He traced the history of England from the landing of Brut, the grand-son Aeneas, through the history of King Arthur and his knights down to to Cadwallo who died in 689. It is probable that Geoffrey simply collected and cleverly put together the legends of his country, though he pretended to have revised some Welsh manuscripts that had been given him. His Chronicles or Historia Britonum as they were called found many delighted readers, but the historians of that time were very angry and said that he had lied shamelessly and saucily throughout. In the ninth j ear of Edward IV., Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte d ' Arthur. This book has been called the work of a man of genius. Its popularity is shown by the fact that it was among the first books printed by Caxton a few years later, Caxton himself being one of those who loved noble acts of chivalry. Dryden, Milton and others thought of writing an epic based on the Arthurian legends, but did not carry out their intentions ; so we find the greates t example of the influence of the legends in Tennyson ' s Idyls, which, it is prophe- sied will retain their popularity in future ages, and, being ranked with Paradise Lost and the Fairy Queen, will be considered one of the greates epics in the English language. Anne Riddle.

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The Augusta Scmmary Annual. 5 In this, the shadow of death has fallen between two spirits who have been joined together in the closest friendship. That friendship had depended for its endnrance on the community of lofty and immortal sympathies, of great thoughts, of pure and earnest afifections. It was beyond the power of death to bring it to an end. Death could only cast a veil of shadow between two friends. It is a stillness, a lofty mournfulness, rather than an overwhelming sorrow that was cast over the life of Tennyson. The grave, majestic, hymnal measure swells like the peal of an organ, yet acts as a brake or undue spasmodic outbursts of discordant grief. Perhaps in none of his minor poems has Tennyson shown the strength, tenderness and beauty of his genius to such a degree as in his epic, The Idyls of the King, where we find the old, old tales of Arthur and the Round Table retold for us, in picture-words, which take us back to the olden time when his knights swore, To reverence the king, As if he were their conscience, And conscience as their King. To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it. To lead sweet lives in purest chastity To love me maiden only, cleave to her, And worship her b} ' years of noble deeds. The Idyls appeared in a disjointed series. It is hardly probable that the poet meant at first to write an epic. They grew as Wolf conceived the Homeiic legends to have done, until the time came for them to be united in one grand epic. Wave and transept, aisle after aisle, the Gothic minister ex- tended, until with the addition of a cloister here and a chapel yonder, the structure stood complete. TheArthur of poetry is a grand ideal character, whose true greatness Guinevesre realizes but too late, when she makes her moan, Ah ! my God What might I have not made of thy fair world, Had I but loved thy brightest creature here ? The Idyls, is an epic of chivalry — our conception of what knighthood should be rather than what it really was. The whole work is sufiused with the Tennysonian glamour of golden