Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/22

10 Fledged with clearest green? How happy, how charmingly apt! Why, a man who has just begun to be aware that there are such things as art and literature is delighted with it. He does not see the gulf that yawns between it and

'Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty.'

What, however, the 'Lotus Eaters' really stands for, of course, is the first successful essay of the genuine Tennysonian music. Half a hundred failures have at last enabled him to 'beat his music out' Certainly, this counts. Any individual articulation in a poet counts. It is a new contribution to the sum of our literature—a fresh note, another rendering of the beauty or the force of things. But in the 'Dream' he does even better still. There we shall find verse like

'I saw, wherever light illumineth, Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand The downward slope to death.'

He is beginning to look at life as it really presents itself, and to try and render it in speech fit for men to listen to.

If we turn from the merely technical aspects of his work, the same timid artificiality still meets us at all points. He juggles away everything which he