Page:Tennysoniana (1879).djvu/54

 But encouragement and sound advice from a high quarter were not wanting. On the 24th of April, 1833, Samuel Taylor Coleridge thus expressed himself:

"I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me, but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in that I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes of success, prescribe to Tennyson—indeed without it he can never be a poet in art—is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres; such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octosyllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would probably thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid