Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/66

Rh of his genius, these characteristics are most prominent. They are marked characteristics, as we have seen, of the Elizabethan poets; they are marked, though not the essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself. Under the influences of the nineteenth century, under wholly new conditions of thought and culture, they manifest themselves in Mr. Tennyson’s poetry in a wholly new way. But they are still there. The essential bent of his poetry is towards such expressions as

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And this way of speaking is the least plain, the most un-Homeric, which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents his thought to you just as it wells from the source of his mind: Mr. Tennyson carefully distils his thought before he will part with it. Hence