"Ghosts from an enchanter fleeing."


Looking at Burns, Byron, Musset, or even at Shelley's earlier years,
youth sees in them the true poets, "sacred things," but also "light,"
as Plato says, inspired to break their wings against the nature of
existence, and the flammantia maenia mundi. But this is almost a
boyish idea, this idea that the true poet is the slave of the
passions, and that the poet who dominates them has none, and is but a
staid domestic animal, an ass browsing the common, as somebody has
written about Wordsworth. Certainly Tennyson's was no "passionless
perfection." He, like others, was tempted to beat with ineffectual
wings against the inscrutable nature of life. He, too, had his dark
hour, and was as subject to temptation as they who yielded to the
stress and died, or became unhappy waifs, "young men with a splendid
past." He must have known, no less than Musset, the attractions of
many a paradis artificiel, with its bright visions, its houris, its
offers of oblivion of pain. "He had the look of one who had suffered
greatly," Mr Palgrave writes in his record of their first meeting in
1842. But he, like Goethe, Scott, and Victor Hugo, had strength as
well as passion and emotion; he came unscorched through the fire that
has burned away the wings of so many other great poets. This was no
less fortunate for the world than for himself. Of his prolonged dark
hour we know little in detail, but we have seen that from the first
he resisted the Tempter; Ulysses is his Retro Sathanas!

About "the mechanism of genius" in Tennyson Mr Palgrave has told us a
little; more appears incidentally in his biography. "It was his way