drama in blank verse. A chorus from this play (as one guesses), a
piece from "an unpublished drama written very early," is published in
the volume of 1830:-


"The varied earth, the moving heaven,
The rapid waste of roving sea,
The fountain-pregnant mountains riven
To shapes of wildest anarchy,
By secret fire and midnight storms
That wander round their windy cones."


These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the classical
transcript, "the varied earth," daedala tellus. There is the
geological interest in the forces that shape the hills. There is the
use of the favourite word "windy," and later in the piece -


"The troublous autumn's SALLOW gloom."


The young poet from boyhood was original in his manner.

Byron made him blase at fourteen. Then Byron died, and Tennyson
scratched on a rock "Byron is dead," on "a day when the whole world
seemed darkened for me." Later he considered Byron's poetry "too
much akin to rhetoric." "Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a
creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality; he is
endlessly clever, and is now unduly depreciated." He "did give the