poems a little more than I like to feel it." Yet Guinevere and
Elaine had been rapidly written and little corrected. I confess to
the opinion that what a man does most easily is, as a rule, what he
does best. We know that the "art and finish" of Shakespeare were
spontaneous, and so were those of Tennyson. Perfection in art is
sometimes more sudden than we think, but then "the long preparation
for it,--that unseen germination, THAT is what we ignore and forget."
But he wisely kept his pieces by him for a long time, restudying them
with a fresh eye. The "unreality" of the subject also failed to
please Ruskin, as it is a stumbling-block to others. He wanted poems
on "the living present," a theme not selected by Homer, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Milton, Virgil, or the Greek dramatists, except (among
surviving plays) in the Persae of AEschylus. The poet who can
transfigure the hot present is fortunate, but most, and the greatest,
have visited the cool quiet purlieus of the past.



CHAPTER VII.--THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.



The Idylls may probably be best considered in their final shape:
they are not an epic, but a series of heroic idyllia of the same
genre as the heroic idyllia of Theocritus. He wrote long after the
natural age of national epic, the age of Homer. He saw the later
literary epic rise in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, a poem
with many beauties, if rather an archaistic and elaborate revival as
a whole. The time for long narrative poems, Theocritus appears to
have thought, was past, and he only ventured on the heroic idyllia of