This is excellent, is poetry, escapes the conceits of Pope (who never
"wrote with his eye on the object"), but is pure Tennyson. We have
not yet, probably we never shall have, an adequate rendering of the
Iliad into verse, and prose translations do not pretend to be
adequate. When parents and dominies have abolished the study of
Greek, something, it seems, will have been lost to the world,--
something which even Tennyson could not restore in English. He
thought blank verse the proper equivalent; but it is no equivalent.
One even prefers his own prose:-


Nor did Paris linger in his lofty halls, but when he had girt on his
gorgeous armour, all of varied bronze, then he rushed thro' the city,
glorying in his airy feet. And as when a stall-kept horse, that is
barley-fed at the manger, breaketh his tether, and dasheth thro' the
plain, spurning it, being wont to bathe himself in the fair-running
river, rioting, and reareth his head, and his mane flieth back on
either shoulder, and he glorieth in his beauty, and his knees bear
him at the gallop to the haunts and meadows of the mares; so ran the
son of Priam, Paris, from the height of Pergamus, all in arms,
glittering like the sun, laughing for light-heartedness, and his
swift feet bare him.


In February 1865 Tennyson lost the mother whose portrait he drew in
Isabel,--"a thing enskied and sainted."

In the autumn of 1865 the Tennysons went on a Continental tour, and
visited Waterloo, Weimar, and Dresden; in September they entertained