Page:Tennyson - Walter Irving (1873).djvu/26



The eminent absurdity of this passage, we think, it would be impossible to equal. The sequence is delightfully varied for the ready comprehension of the reader, whose imagination is presumed to be as much at variance with reason as this passage is. The personages change places more often than the representatives of Mr Nicolini's famous lion. When naturally and properly you expect He to speak, She speaks instead; and when you are prepared to hear Gareth speak, the Noonday Sun (the flower of chivalry) roars beyond the roaring shallow; and after this wild-beast interchange of communication, Gareth. shrills, like a steam-engine, athwart the shallow; then the Sun (the flower of chivalry), who has a face of rounded foolishness, pushes his horse (one, we presume, out of Phoebus' car) across the foamings, not across the ford, be it observed, which would be too commonplace an action for the Sun, who must glide, horse and himself together, over the foamings, like a gondolier in his gondola moving along the moon-lit streams of the City of Song. Four strokes are struck with sword, and we are told they are mighty; then the Sun, when he is heaving up his ponderous arm, is washed away by the stream, his horse having slipt its hoof in the stream. If Mr Tennyson could be criticised on reasonable and fair grounds, we would take exception to the size and colour of the horse. It is such a horse as no knight could bestride, even suppose he is called the Noonday Sun; and the colour is the same which Caleb Plummer considers "very like natur." It is only Mr Tennyson who would think of forcing beauty out of a comparison between a