Our book today is a grand Victorian thing, an illustrated 1884 edition of the poems of Tennyson published by dear old James Osgood & Co. on Tremont Street in Boston. This is an appreciation, a tribute to the 19^th century’s greatest poet; it has no critical apparatus of any kind and certainly cannot be consulted as one would consult Christopher Ricks’ great 1989 edition of Tennyson. Instead, it presents its readers with page after page of double-columned verse frequently enlivened with black-and-white illustrations, including a healthy abundance of engravings by Gustav Dore.

Virtually all of Tennyson’s verse fits in here, from dozens of shorter pieces to all the longer pieces like “St. Simeon Sylites,” “The Talking Oak,” “Locksley Hall,” and “The Princess: A Medley” – longer pieces that did so much to cement his reputation and that were so eagerly anticipated by a broader swath of the reading public than any poet could even dream of reaching today. “The Lotus-Eaters” is here, with its great passages:

“Courage!” he said, and pointed toward the land,

“This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.”

In the afternoon they came unto a land,

In which is seemed always afternoon.

All round the coast the languid air did swoon,

Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.

Full-faced above the valley stood the moon:

And like a downward smoke, the slender stream

Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

They sat them down upon the yellow sand,

Between the sun and moon upon the shore;

And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,

Of child, and wife and slave; but evermore

Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.

Then some one said, “We will return no more!”

And all at once they sang, “Our island home

Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”

The loud and harrowing “In Memoriam” is here, and “Maud,” and of course his “Idylls of the King” with all its pathos. And Charles Hayward, who owned this volume before I did (he practiced his finest signature on a little card he left in its pages a hundred years ago), naturally made a marginal note to mark the location of Tennyson’s fantastic poem “Ulysses” with its ringing final lines:

Come my friends,

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides, and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

Every personal library needs Tennyson, needless to say, and a big pretty volume like this one is, I think, just as important as a critical, annotated volume like Ricks’ – Tennyson is a fiercely intelligent and allusive poet, somebody whose work richly repays critical study. But he also very much wrote to be read and enjoyed by everybody, and a nice old volume like this one is a good reminder of that.