The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are
statements of a mythical nature confined to the lips of the clergy.
The poet was anxious that freedom should "broaden down," but
"slowly," not with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in a hurry
will never care for the political poems, and it is certain that
Tennyson did not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian
patriot who said that his darling desire was "to cut the throats of
all the cures," like some Covenanters of old. "Mais vous connaissez
mon coeur"--"and a pretty black one it is," thought young Tennyson.
So cautious in youth, during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830,
Tennyson could not become a convinced revolutionary later. We must
accept him with his limitations: nor must we confuse him with the
hero of his Locksley Hall, one of the most popular, and most
parodied, of the poems of 1842: full of beautiful images and
"confusions of a wasted youth," a youth dramatically conceived, and
in no way autobiographical.

In so marvellous a treasure of precious things as the volumes of
1842, perhaps none is more splendid, perfect, and perdurable than the
Morte d'Arthur. It had been written seven years earlier, and
pronounced by the poet "not bad." Tennyson was never, perhaps, a
very deep Arthurian student. A little cheap copy of Malory was his
companion. {4} He does not appear to have gone deeply into the
French and German "literature of the subject." Malory's compilation
(1485) from French and English sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady
Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials. The whole poem,
enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as
the hilt of Excalibur, with classical memories. "A faint Homeric
echo" it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but the absolute voice of old