13 JULY 1944, Page 4

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Nevertheless, one does not go back to the Idylls for their tires° jousts any more than one reads them for their tiresome uplift. Wh all is said against Tennyson, he remains a splendid poet of visible world. Tennyson's descriptions of sea and land may ha' nothing of the inner power and cosmic strength of Wordsworth ev at his second best, yet, as descriptions of things seen, they a masterpieces. It may have been, perhaps, because I knew that the was nothing prophetic, nothing fateful about the Idylls that I IA almost startled by the passage at which I opened the book.

passage described the sudden fall, and final catastrophe, of the fe knight in The Last Tournament: - . . as the crest of some slow-arching wave

Heard in dead night along that table-shore, Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,

From less and less to nothing ; thus he fell.

Too good for Hitler and, I think, t,00 good for Hitler's Germany.

NUMA POMPILWS.