A LETTER ΤΟ THE EDITOR OF NOTES AND QUERIES. SIR, 34, WESTLAND-ROW, DUBLIN, August 23, 1851. In that Number (No. 92, for August 2, 1851) of your entertaining Journal, in which you have been so kind as to insert my reasons for thinking that the idea which a correspondent of yours supposes Tennyson to have borrowed from Virgil, was never in Virgil's mind at all, and therefore could not have been easily borrowed from him, are contained some, as it seems to me, just strictures upon the fifty-first stanza of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold. Will you allow me to address a few words to you on the same subject, and not to you alone, Mr. Editor, but to all the readers of your Journal, among whom, perhaps, some one may be found inclined to take pity on my distressed situation, and able to help me out of it? The stanza is as follows: Appear'dst thou not to Paris in this guise? In all thy perfect goddess-ship, when lies Showered on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from an urn!" I am, Mr. Editor, as you may already have perceived, a plain, practical, straightforward, unsophisticated sort of a man, desirous to extract some meaning, and, if possible, some improvement out of every thing I read, and have, with that object in view, read this undoubtedly one of the most beautiful stanzas of the most beautiful of all the poems of one of the greatest, if not the very greatest of all poets, a dozen, perhaps twenty times over, from beginning to end, carefully, deliberately, and meditatively; and am sorry to say (sorry, I mean, on my own account) that I have not yet been able perfectly to satisfy myself as to the exact meaning of several parts of it; and I put it to you, Mr. Editor, if it is not indispensably necessary that I should rightly understand it, not only in its several parts, but in its totality, before I can be much enlightened by it, or derive any great advantage from reading it; above all, before it would be prudent of me to commit it to memory, for the purpose of quoting it occasionally, as it is my con stant practice to do, with all the pre-eminently beautiful poetical snatches, especially of this author's, that from time to time happen to be thrown prominently in my way. Now, I will not deny it, Mr. Editor, that my first impression, on reading this stanza over for the first time, was, that all the lines after the second might be somewhat of the nature of Mr. Albert Smith's Diamond Dust, unmeaning words, ingeniously put together to deceive the unwary into a belief that they had meaning. But this impression was little more than momentary; for, on the second reading I thought I could discover, and on the third reading I was sure I did discover, in the lines in question, the indistinct glimmer of an unsteady picture; which indistinct glimmer or waver became more distinct on a fourth reading; and on the fifth, I was able, as I thought, to fix steadily and distinctly before my eyes the picture intended by the great master: viz., that of the Lord of War lying where the Goddess had stretched him on the ground before her, conquered: "When lies Before thee thy own vanquished Lord of War.” It was, indeed, suggested to me by my chum (as ardent an admirer of the great poet as I am myself), that the picture presented might be that of the Lord of War lying in the Goddess's goddess-ship: "In all thy perfect goddess-ship, when lies Before thee thy own vanquished Lord of War." But although I could not deny that the grammatical structure did indeed admit of such interpretation, I rejected the suggestion, however ingenious, on the simple ground, that the picture of the Lord of War lying in the Goddess's goddess-ship was, to my perhaps too prosaic mind, as good as no picture at all; I could not, for the life of me, realize it. However, my friend's demurrer to what I had persuaded myself was certainly the meaning of the passage, having raised a suspicion in my mind that, perhaps, after all, neither of us was right, and that the noble author might possibly have had in view some other meaning, which had escaped both of us, I set myself down in good earnest to think over the matter, and, after the deliberation of a live-long night, during which I kept myself awake and up to the sticking point by the downright force of tea and tobacco, I began, just as the morning broke, and the gas-lights were being extinguished, and the rosy beams of the sun were on the point of commencing their fruitless daily effort to gild the sooty cement-pots of the Dublin chimney-tops, and my tea was done, and my pipe was out, I began to take a doze, you will say, Mr. Editor-No; but to feel convinced that, such was the richness of the poet, there were in fact two pictures where neither my chum nor I had been able, the preceding evening, to see more than one; and that the real meaning was, that the Lord of War, at first vanquished and stretched almost dying on the ground before the Goddess, had gradually so far |