exquisitely blended in the confusions of a dream, for a dream is the
thing most akin to The Princess. Time does not exist in the realm of
Gama, or in the ideal university of Ida. We have a bookless North,
severed but by a frontier pillar from a golden and learned South.
The arts, from architecture to miniature-painting, are in their
highest perfection, while knights still tourney in armour, and the
quarrel of two nations is decided as in the gentle and joyous passage
of arms at Ashby de la Zouche. Such confusions are purposefully
dream-like: the vision being a composite thing, as dreams are,
haunted by the modern scene of the holiday in the park, the "gallant
glorious chronicle," the Abbey, and that "old crusading knight
austere," Sir Ralph. The seven narrators of the scheme are like the
"split personalities" of dreams, and the whole scheme is of great
technical skill. The earlier editions lacked the beautiful songs of
the ladies, and that additional trait of dream, the strange trance-
like seizures of the Prince: "fallings from us, vanishings," in
Wordsworthian phrase; instances of "dissociation," in modern
psychological terminology. Tennyson himself, like Shelley and
Wordsworth, had experience of this kind of dreaming awake which he
attributes to his Prince, to strengthen the shadowy yet brilliant
character of his romance. It is a thing of normal and natural points
de repere; of daylight suggestion, touched as with the magnifying and
intensifying elements of haschish-begotten phantasmagoria. In the
same way opium raised into the region of brilliant vision that
passage of Purchas which Coleridge was reading before he dreamed
Kubla Khan. But in Tennyson the effects were deliberately sought and
secured.

One might conjecture, though Lord Tennyson says nothing on the
subject, that among the suggestions for The Princess was the opening