Page:Tennyson; the Leslie Stephen lecture.djvu/18

 does not trouble itself with the story of the maid of Astolat as it is given in detail in the French book and in Malory; it takes hardly anything from the French book but the death of the Lady of Shalott; the voyage in the boat without a steersman; and the marvel in the Court of King Arthur at Camelot.

Great part of the beauty of Tennyson's poem comes from the mystery of its story. It is a lyrical romance, and its setting is in a visionary land; there is no burden of historical substance in it as there is in the Idylls of the King. This strange isolation of the story, making its own world, is part of the old Italian novella; and it is this quality which makes the greatest distinction in the new order of romantic poetry to which Tennyson's poem belongs. It is this which is found in La Belle Dame sans Mercy and in the most magical poems of William Morris's first volume. It makes these poems, and The Lady of Shalott along with them, very different from the older romantic school