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Tennyson: His Life and Times (Classic Reprint)
Tennyson His Life and Times - Classic Reprint Author:G. K. Chesterton TENNYSON I T was merely the accident of his hour, the call of his age, which made Tennyson a philosophic poet. He was naturally not only a pure lover of beauty, hut a pure lover of beauty in a much more peculiar and distinguished sense even than a man like Keats, or a man like Robert Bridges. He gave us scenes of Nature that cannot easily he sur... more »passed, but be chose them like a landscape painter rather than like a religious poet. Above all, lie exhibited his abstract love of the beautiful in one most personal and characteristic fact. lie was never so successful or so triumphant as when he was describing not Nature, but art. lie could describe a statue as Shelley could describe a cloud. He was at his very best in describing buildings, in their blending of aspiration and exactitude. He found to perfection the harmony between the rhythmic recurrences of poetry and the rhythmic recurrences of architecture. His description, for example, of the Palace of Art is a tiling entirely victorious
Table of Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ALFRED TENNYSON ... . Frontispiece
THE BROOK AT SOMEHSBY ...... 1
AN EARLY PORTRAIT OF TENNYSON ..... 2
SOMERSBY RECTORY, LINCOLNSHIRE (where Alfred Tennyson was born) . . 3
LOLTH . 4
SOMERSBY CHURCH . 4,
ALFRED TENNYSON (from the painting by Samuel Laurence) . 5
TENNYSON S MOTHER ...... g
BAG EXDERBY CHURCH ......... g
ALFRED TENNYSON, 1838 7
OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL, LOUTH ...... 7
ARTHUR H. HALLAM (from the bust by Chantrey) ... 8
ALFRED TENNYSON (from the medallion by Thomas Woolner, R.A.) . . 9