Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/184

 sents on his first appearance in the arena where he was to outstrip all rivals. His Keep-sake period lasted long. Looking back, we can indeed discern in the volume of 1842—in the Ulysses, in the Morte d'Arthur, in The Two Voices the promise of nearly all that was to come. But these were imbedded in much that was pretty but petty, Wordsworthian idylls too long drawn out, Lords of Burleigh and Ladies Clare, that half justified the early scoffers, Wilson and the rest. Even the melody, though sweet and clear, was thin and at times tinkling. Grace, not force or dignity, was the characteristic up to and including The Princess of 1847, the most graceful poem of such length in the language. The Rape of the Lock, the only other poem in English literature that can be compared with it, is more witty than graceful.

Yet all the while the master was growing in command over his instrument. Even in the earlier volumes of 1830 and 1832 there were premonitions of the almost flawless workmanship in words which was to be the cachet of Tennyson's style. They say that men's minds ossify after forty. Certainly there comes to languages growing old a stage of ossification, when new collocations of words become increasingly difficult and the conventional epithet is stereotyped and polarised. In the history