death; Wordsworth had shot his bolt, though an arrow or two were left
in the quiver. Keats, Shelley, and Byron were dead; Milman's brief
vogue was departing. It seemed as if novels alone could appeal to
readers, so great a change in taste had been wrought by the sixteen
years of Waverley romances. The slim volume of Tennyson was
naturally neglected, though Leigh Hunt reviewed it in the Tatler.
Hallam's comments in the Englishman's Magazine, though enthusiastic
(as was right and natural), were judicious. "The author imitates no
one." Coleridge did not read all the book, but noted "things of a
good deal of beauty. The misfortune is that he has begun to write
verses without very well understanding what metre is." As Tennyson
said in 1890, "So I, an old man, who get a poem or poems every day,
might cast a casual glance at a book, and seeing something which I
could not scan or understand, might possibly decide against the book
without further consideration." As a rule, the said books are
worthless. The number of versifiers makes it hard, indeed, for the
poet to win recognition. One little new book of rhyme is so like
another, and almost all are of so little interest!

The rare book that differs from the rest has a bizarrerie with its
originality, and in the poems of 1830 there was, assuredly, more than
enough of the bizarre. There were no hyphens in the double epithets,
and words like "tendriltwine" seemed provokingly affected. A kind of
lusciousness, like that of Keats when under the influence of Leigh
Hunt, may here and there be observed. Such faults as these catch the
indifferent eye when a new book is first opened, and the volume of
1830 was probably condemned by almost every reader of the previous
generation who deigned to afford it a glance. Out of fifty-six
pieces only twenty-three were reprinted in the two volumes of 1842,
which won for Tennyson the general recognition of the world of