TENNYSON AND PATMORE.
[To THE EDITOR OP TRE " SPEGTATos.."] SIR,—" A. S." has found in Petrarch a passage which he thinks suggested Tennyson's reference to,- " Him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things."
Will you kindly allow another attempt at identification? Coventry Patmore's " Angel in the House" occur the lines,—
" How often one dead joy appears The platform of some bettor hope 1" (l'ur VLTL, " Sarum Plain," Idyll S.)
Not only are the words and mode of expression more nearly the same, but the thought is exactly similar in Tennyson and Pat more, a future gain or gladness in this life arising from some earlier loss or grief; whereas the passage in Petrarch is intended only to exalt the nature of love which leads us up from earthly things to God, the cause of all, But the remarkable difference which puts Petrarch quite out of the field as the sug- gester of the thought,- is that Tennyson expresses himself as not agreeing with this sentiment of the possible benefit of loss ; he "held it true" once, he says, but now, absorbed in his grief, he asks,—
"But who shall so forecast the years, Or find in loss a gain to match?"
In Memoriam" was published before "The Angel in the House ;" but from what Patmore himself says, Tennyson must have seen the latter in manuscript.
"A letter from the Laureate thrilled Her voice who read it,"
(which letter is supposed to•be written in acknowledgment of the first volume, which contained the two above-quoted lines).—
[The first edition of "In Memoriam" was published in 1850, and had been for the most part written long before; "The Angel in the House" was not published till 1854, and it is, we think, very,unlikely that Mr. Patmore was the poet alluded to The lines, indeed, do not strike us as at all close-fitting, if Mr. Patmore were the poet intended. Nor, indeed, is the thought the same in the two instances.—En. Spectator.]
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