“Soft lustre bathes the range of urns
    On every slanting terrace-lawn: 
  The fountain to its place returns,
    Deep in the garden lake withdrawn.”

The furnishings of the palace are a mixture of mediaeval and Louis Quatorze—­clocks, peacocks, parrots, golden mantle pegs:—­

  “Till all the hundred summers pass,
    The beams that through the oriel shine
  Make prisms in every carven glass
    And beaker brimm’d with noble wine.”

But the impression, as a whole, is of the Middle Age of poetic convention, if not of history; the enchanted dateless era of romance and fairy legend.

“St. Agnes” and “Sir Galahad,” its masculine counterpart, sound the old Catholic notes of saintly virginity and mystical, religious rapture, the Gottesminne of mediaeval hymnody.  Not since Southwell’s “Burning Babe” and Crashaw’s “Saint Theresa” had any English poet given such expression to those fervid devotional moods which Sir Thomas Browne describes as “Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God and ingression into the divine shadow.”  This vein, we have noticed, is wanting in Scott.  On the other hand, it may be noticed in passing, Tennyson’s attitude towards nature is less exclusively romantic—­in the narrow sense—­than Scott’s.  He, too, is conscious of the historic associations of place.  In Tennyson, as in Scott,—­

  “The splendour falls on castle walls
    And snowy summits old in story”—­[26]

but, in general, his treatment of landscape, in its human relations, is subtler and more intimate.

“St. Agnes” and “Sir Galahad” are monologues, but lyric and not dramatic in Browning’s manner.  There is a dramatic falsity, indeed, in making Sir Galahad say of himself—­

  “My strength is as the strength of ten
    Because my heart is pure,”

and the poem would be better in the third person.  “St. Simeon Stylites” is a dramatic monologue more upon Browning’s model, i.e., a piece of apologetics and self-analysis.  But in this province Tennyson is greatly Browning’s inferior.

“The Princess” (1847) is representative of that “splendid composite of imagery,” and that application of modern ideas to legendary material, or to invented material arbitrarily placed in an archaic setting, which are characteristic of this artist.  The poem’s sub-title is “A Medley,” because it is

        “—­made to suit with time and place,
  A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house,
  A talk of college and of ladies’ rights,
  A feudal knight in silken masquerade,
  And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments.”

The problem is a modern one—­the New Woman.  No precise historic period is indicated.  The female university is full of classic lore and art, but withal there are courts of feudal kings, with barons, knights, and squires, and shock of armoured champions in the lists.