Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/34

22 her final 'self-contempt' as an orthodox materfamilias. With an amazing want of perception Lord Tennyson, half a century later, tried to paint his hero even blacker than he had already painted him, and in a sequel shows us Amy as a happy saint, and her husband as a model husband! This is very funny—far funnier than 'The Northern Cobbler,' or even our terrible young friend 'The May Queen'; but surely it was not needed. The fact remains that in 'Locksley Hall' he wrote some exceedingly fine verse, and, when he arrived at his more lucid moods, was able to compose some love-songs to a woman as perfect in their way as his love-elegiacs to his friend. Here and there 'Maud' reaches to real passion and the perfected expression of it. Her love has made his life 'a perfumed altar flame.' 'He has walked awake with Truth' for the first time in his life, and he takes us with him. And the poignant note—the tone of the agony of loss, 'deep as first love and wild with all regret'—he has won it at last. And there is more to be said. The advance he makes now is made all along the line. Compare 'Tithonus' with 'Œnone,' 'Lucretius' with 'The Palace of Art,' 'The Grandmother' and the two 'Northern Farmers' with (once more, and for the last time) that cruel 'May Queen,' 'The Sailor Boy' with 'Lady Clara Vere de Vere,' 'Flower in the Crannied Wall' with 'To J. S.' It is