Search -
The Life and Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (v. 2)
The Life and Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson - v. 2 Author:Alfred Tennyson Tennyson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II "THE PRINCESS" Maybe wildest dreams Are but the needful preludes of the truth. O lift your natures up : Embrace our aims : work out your fre... more »edom ! There are thousands now Such women, but convention beats them down ; It is but bringing up ; no more than that. " I say God made the woman for the man, And for the good and increase of the world." " Parson," said I, "you pitch the pipe too low." What some one called the " herald-melody " of the higher education of women, " The Princess," mostly written in Lincoln's Inn Fields, was published in 1847, anc at this time "The Golden Year " was added to the Poems. The subject of " The Princess," my father believed, was original,and certainly the story is full of original incident, humour and fancy.1 It may have suggested itself when the project of a Women's College was in the air,2 or it may have arisen in its mock-heroic form from a Cambridge joke, such as he commemorated in these lines, which I found in one of his old MS. books: The Doctors Daughter. (Unpublished) Sweet Kitty Sandilands, The daughter of the doctor, We drest her in the Proctor's bands, And past her for the Proctor. All the men ran from her That would have hasten'd to her, All the men ran from her That would have come to woo her. Up the street we took her As far as to the Castle, Jauntily sat the Proctor's cap And from it hung the tassel. As for the various characters in the poem, they give all possible views of Woman's higheri847 GREAT SOCIAL QUESTIONS 1 Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the great mathematician, said : "It deeply presses on my reflection how much wiser a book is Tennyson's Princess than my Quaternions" 2 He talked over the plan of the poem with my mother in 1839. education ; and ...« less