however, mainly dealt with English, contemporary, and domestic
themes--"the poetry of the affections." An old woman, a district
visitor reported, regarded Enoch Arden as "more beautiful" than the
other tracts which were read to her. It is indeed a tender and
touching tale, based on a folk-story which Tennyson found current in
Brittany as well as in England. Nor is the unseen and unknown
landscape of the tropic isle less happily created by the poet's
imagination than the familiar English cliffs and hazel copses:-


"The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes,
The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The lustre of the long convolvuluses
That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran
Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world,
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
He could not see, the kindly human face,
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail:
No sail from day to day, but every day