Alexandre Dumas says, at the great drama of Life.

With The Day-Dream (of The Sleeping Beauty) Tennyson again displays
his matchless range of powers. Verse of Society rises into a charmed
and musical fantasy, passing from the Berlin-wool work of the period


("Take the broidery frame, and add
A crimson to the quaint Macaw")


into the enchanted land of the fable: princes immortal, princesses
eternally young and fair. The St Agnes and Sir Galahad, companion
pieces, contain the romance, as St Simeon Stylites shows the
repulsive side of asceticism; for the saint and the knight are young,
beautiful, and eager as St Theresa in her childhood. It has been
said, I do not know on what authority, that the poet had no
recollection of composing Sir Galahad, any more than Scott remembered
composing The Bride of Lammermoor, or Thackeray parts of Pendennis.
The haunting of Tennyson's mind by the Arthurian legends prompted
also the lovely fragment on the Queen's last Maying, Sir Launcelot
and Queen Guinevere, a thing of perfect charm and music. The ballads
of Lady Clare and The Lord of Burleigh are not examples of the poet
in his strength; for his power and fantasy we must turn to The Vision
of Sin, where the early passages have the languid voluptuous music of
The Lotos-Eaters, with the ethical element superadded, while the
portion beginning -


"Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin