Evidence: |
From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson:
'I had put the scheme of my Golden Treasury before him during a walk near to Land's End in the late summer of 1860 [...] at the Christmas-tide following, the gathered materials [...] were laid before Tennyson for final judgement [...] With most by far of the pieces submitted he was already acquainted: but I seem to remember more of less special praise of Lodge's "Rosaline," of "My Love in her attire...": and the "Emigrant's Song" by Marvell. For some poems by that writer then with difficulty accessible, he had a special admiration: delighting to read, with a voice hardly yet to me silent, and dwelling more than once, on the magnificent hyperbole, the powerful union of pathos and humour in the lines "To his coy Mistress" [...]
'After reading Cowper's "Poplar Field": "People nowadays, I believe, hold this style and metre light; I wish there were any who could put words together with such exquisite flow and evenness." Presently we reached the same poet's stanzas to Mary Unwin. He read them, yet could barely read them, so deeply was he touched by their tender, their almost agonising pathos [...]
Petrarch [...] furnished a not dissimilar instance, in the ethereally-beautiful lines on the death of Laura ("Trionfa della Morte," Cap.1) [quotes six lines] [...] I remember still the tenderness with which he dwelt on the words, the sigh of delight -- almost, perhaps, the tears -- that came naturally to the sensitive soul, as he ended' |