Take me; I'll serve you better in a strait;

I grate on rusty hinges here;' but 'No!'
Roared the rough king, 'you shall not; we ourself
Will crush her pretty maiden fancies dead

In iron gauntlets; break the council up.'

But when the council broke, I rose and passed Thro' the wild woods that hung about the town ;

85

90

Found a still place, and plucked her likeness out;
Laid it on flowers, and watched it lying bathed
In the green gleam of dewy-tasseled trees :

What were those fancies? wherefore break her troth?
Proud looked the lips; but while I meditated

95

90. Hung. Luce notes the mannerism in Tennyson's frequent use of this verb in the poetical sense here employed, — no fewer than nine times in The Princess.

91. Likeness.

Cf. 37.

92. Bathed. Cf. The Day-Dream 29:

Soft lustre bathes the range of urns

On every slanting terrace-lawn.

·

93. Dewy-tasseled. Hallam Tennyson comments: Hung with catkins as in the hazel-wood. It was spring-time' (Wallace). Tennyson uses it again in In Memoriam (LXXXVI. 6) :

Thro' all the dewy-tasseled wood.

Brooke says (Tennyson, p. 160): 'The lines . . . exactly express that which is so rarely observed, - the different murmurs of differently foliaged trees in a faint wind, which a fine ear can distinguish in a wood, but which, when a fuller puff goes by, are merged into one chorus with the singing of birds and tossing of boughs.'

A wind arose and rushed upon the South,

And shook the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks
Of the wild woods together; and a Voice

Went with it, Follow, follow, thou shalt win.'

Then, ere the silver sickle of that month Became her golden shield, I stole from court With Cyril and with Florian, unperceived, Cat-footed thro' the town, and half in dread To hear my father's clamor at our backs,

With Ho!' from some bay-window shake the night;
But all was quiet; from the bastioned walls
Like threaded spiders, one by one, we dropped,
And flying reached the frontier; then we crossed
To a livelier land; and so by tilth and grange,

96-99.

As long ago as 1880 Collins noted that this was a reminiscence of a quatrain from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (II. 1. 156-9):

A wind arose among the pines; it shook

The clinging music from their boughs, and then
Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts,
Were heard: 'Oh follow, follow, follow me!'

Dawson remarked (Study, p. 65), that it must have, consciously or unconsciously, dwelt in Tennyson's memory when writing these lines. See Tennyson's rejoinder in his letter, p. xxxviii.

Mrs. Ritchie's statement should also be noted (Harper's Magazine LXVIII. 21): 'The wind . . . once. . . came sweeping through the garden of this old Lincolnshire rectory, and, as the wind blew, a sturdy child of five years old, with shining locks, stood opening his arms upon the blast and letting himself be blown along, and as he traveled on he made his first line of poetry and said, “I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind," and he tossed his arms, and the gust whirled on, sweeping into the great abyss of winds.' Compare also the line in Rizpah:

And Willy's voice in the wind, 'O mother, come out to me.'

100. Briefly paraphrase the dependent clause.

109. Tilth.

Cultivated soil; so in Milton, Paradise Lost XI. 430, and in Enoch Arden 676.- Grange. An isolated farmhouse

100

105

And vines, and blowing bosks of wilderness,
We gained the mother-city thick with towers,
And in the imperial palace found the king.

His name was Gama; cracked and small his voice,
But bland the smile that, like a wrinkling wind
On glassy water, drove his cheek in lines;

IIO

115

A little dry old man, without a star,

Not like a king. Three days he feasted us,
And on the fourth I spake of why we came,

And my betrothed. 'You do us, Prince,' he said,

regarded as the residence of a gentleman farmer (Standard Dictionary). Cf. the description of the grange in Mariana. There we have:

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch

Upon the lonely moated grange.

And in Sir Galahad:

So pass I hostel, hall, and grange.

Also In Memoriam XCI. 12; C. 5.

'Uncultivated thickets

110. Blowing bosks of wilderness. blooming with wild flowers' (Dawson). Collins (Illustrations of Tennyson, p. 19) gives bosks as an illustration of Tennyson's propensity, like Virgil's, to 'affect archaisms and the revival or adoption of obsolete or provincial words.' Bristed says (Amer. Mag. VIII. 32): 'How like a journey in fairyland it is, with all those quaint Elizabethan words!'

III. Mother-city. Metropolis; cf. 'mother-town,' In Memoriam XCVIII. 21. What is the literal meaning of metropolis?

113. 'Gama is the impersonation of insignificance and effeminacy, and his view of women is, like his character, insignificant.' 114-5. Wace compares Shelley, Prince Athanase (II. ii. 47–51):

But o'er the vision wan

Of Athanase, a ruffling atmosphere

Of dark emotion, a swift shadow ran,

Like wind upon some forest-bosomed lake,

Glassy and dark.

116. Without a star. Stars are frequently worn by persons of rank as indications of their membership in orders of nobility.

Airing a snowy hand and signet gem,

'All honor. We remember love ourselves
In our sweet youth; there did a compact pass
Long summers back, a kind of ceremony
I think the year in which our olives failed.
I would you had her, Prince, with all my heart,
With my full heart; but there were widows here,
Two widows, Lady Psyche, Lady Blanche;

They fed her theories, in and out of place
Maintaining that with equal husbandry
The woman were an equal to the man.

They harped on this; with this our banquets rang;
Our dances broke and buzzed in knots of talk;
Nothing but this; my very ears were hot

To hear them; knowledge, so my daughter held,

121. Ourselves. Rolfe suggests that this should be ourself, comparing V. 198.

128 ff. Cf. III. 69 ff.; IV. 273 ff.; VI. 304 ff. 129. Husbandry. A pun?

134. Knowledge, etc. Dawson says (Study, p. 67): This is the central point of the Princess's delusion. Some have thought that Tennyson borrowed the idea of his poem from Johnson's Rasselas. It is a long way from Rasselas to The Princess. The following is the only passage upon which this theory is based,

support:

a very slender

"The Princess thought that of all sublunary things knowledge was the best; she desired, first, to learn all sciences, and then proposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside, that by conversing with the old and educating the young she might divide her time between the acquisition and communication of wisdom."

'Others suppose that the idea was suggested by Love's Labor's Lost I. I:

Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.

This is far more probable, because the plot of that play turns on the attempted seclusion of a king and his attendants for three

120

125

130

135

Was all in all; they had but been, she thought,
As children; they must lose the child, assume
The woman; then, Sir, awful odes she wrote,
Too awful, sure, for what they treated of,

years in study, during which time no woman was to approach the court. The disturbing influence of love upon such a plan is the motive of the comedy.'

Collins (Illustrations of Tennyson, p. 78) suggests the Faerie Queene, Bk. V., cantos iv.-vi., and adds: 'In any case, it should be carefully compared with the latter, as the moral and the teaching are identical; both being refutations of the theory advanced in the fifth book of Plato's Republic.' On the question of these origins, see Luce, Handbook, pp. 233-5.

On the larger question of the rank of mere knowledge, cf. Locksley Hall:

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

In Memoriam, Invocation:

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell,
That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before,

But vaster.

In Memoriam CXIV. 22-23:

For she is earthly of the mind,

But Wisdom heavenly of the soul.

And indeed the whole of In Memoriam CXIV, besides the following from Cowper's Task (VI. 88–99) :

Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,

Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men ;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which wisdom builds
Till smoothed, and squared, and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber when it should enrich.

Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;

Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

136. They must lose the child.

Cf. Prol. 133.