(And this way and that he divides his swift mind).


Another way in which they affect him is where, without direct imitation,
they colour passages and poems as in 'Oenone', 'The Lotos Eaters',
'Tithonus', 'Tiresias', 'The Death of Oenone', 'Demeter and Persephone',
the passage beginning "From the woods" in 'The Gardener's Daughter',
which is a parody of Theocritus, 'Id.', vii., 139 'seq.', while the
Cyclops' invocation to Galatea in Theocritus, 'Id.', xi., 29-79, was
plainly the model for the idyll, "Come down, O Maid," in the seventh
section of 'The Princess', just as the tournament in the same poem
recalls closely the epic of Homer and Virgil. Tennyson had a wonderful
way of transfusing, as it were, the essence of some beautiful passage in
a Greek or Roman poet into English. A striking illustration of this
would be the influence of reminiscences of Virgil's fourth 'Aeneid' on
the idyll of 'Elaine and Guinevere'. Compare, for instance, the
following: he is describing the love-wasted Elaine, as she sits brooding
in the lonely evening, with the shadow of the wished-for death falling
on her:--

But when they left her to herself again,
Death, like a friend's voice from a distant field,
Approaching through the darkness, call'd; the owls
Wailing had power upon her, and she mix'd
Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms
Of evening and the moanings of the wind.


How exactly does this recall, in a manner to be felt rather than exactly
defined, a passage equally exquisite and equally pathetic in Virgil's