Menelaus pining in his desolate palace for the lost Helen:--

[Greek: pothoi d' uperpontias phasma doxei dom_on anassein.]

(And in his yearning love for her who is over the sea a phantom will
seem to reign over his palace.)


What are the lines in 'Guinevere' but an expansion of what is latent but
unfolded in the pregnant suggestiveness of the Greek poet:--

And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk
Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,
And I should evermore be vex'd with thee
In hanging robe or vacant ornament,
Or ghostly foot-fall echoing on the stair--


with a reminiscence also perhaps of Constance's speech in 'King John',
III., iv.

It need hardly be said that these particular passages, and possibly some
of the others, may be mere coincidences, but they illustrate what
numberless other passages which could be cited prove that Tennyson's
careful and meditative study of the Greek and Roman poets enabled him to
enrich his work by these felicitous adaptations.

He used those poets as his master Virgil used his Greek predecessors,
and what the elder Seneca said of Ovid, who had appropriated a line from
Virgil, might exactly be applied to Tennyson: "Fecisse quod in multis