And the Latin for spring ever was and is still, ver."
But then purists shook their heads and said that Latin was not English, and the challenge was for English rimes.
As for "month," Mr. Swinburne did not hesitate to write a whole volume of exquisite poems to a child to bring in his rime for month: it was millionth but the metre was so handled by the master that it would have been impossible for even the most casual reader to make the word a dissyllable. In the same volume he found a rime for babe in "astrolabe."
(With regard to my spelling of the word "rime," I may here remark that I have done so for years. I was gratified to find my lead followed in the _Cambridge History of English Literature._)
And all this weedy harvest of criticism and reminiscence has come through my quoting Tennyson without an apology! All that I really had to say was that there is no maker of verses in England to-day who has the same mastery of metre as Tennyson had. It is indeed because of the delicacy of his ear for words that so many readers are disposed to think his verse artificial. But there are people who think that all art is artificial. (This is a very imminent subject for consideration in a garden, and it has been considered by great authorities in at least two books, to which I may refer if I go so far as to write something about a garden in these pages.) All that I will say about the art, the artifice, the artfulness, or the artificiality of the pictures that Tennyson brings before my eyes through his mastery of his medium, is that I have always placed a higher value upon the meticulous than upon the slap-dash in every form of art. It was said that the late Duke of Cambridge could detect a speck of rust on a sabre quicker than any Commander-in-Chief that ever lived; but I do not therefore hold that he was a greater soldier than Marlborough. But if Marlborough could make the brightness of his sabres do the things that he meant them to do, his victories were all the more brilliant.
I dare say there are quite a number of people who think that Edmund Yates's doggerel about a brand of Champagne--it commences something like this, if my memory serves me:--
quite equal to the best that Calverley or Seaman ever wrote, because it has that slap-dash element about it that disregards correct rimes; but I am not among those critics. Tennyson does not usually paint an impressionist picture, though he can do so when he pleases; he is rather a pre-Raphaelite; but, however he works, he produces his picture and it is a picture. Talk of Art and Nature--there never was a poet who reproduced Nature with an art so consummate; there never was a poet who used his art so graphically. Of course I am now talking of Tennyson at his best, not of Tennyson of _The May Queen_, which is certainly deficient enough in art to please---as it has pleased--the despisers of the meticulous, but of Tennyson in his lyrical mood--of the garden-song in _Maud_, of the echo-song in _The Princess_---both diamonds, not in the rough, but cut into countless facets--Tennyson in _The Passing of Arthur_, and countless pages of the _Idylls_, Tennyson of the pictorial simplicity of _Enoch Arden_ and the full brush of _Ulysses, Tithonus, Lucretius_, the battle glow of _The Ballad of the Revenge_, the muted trumpet-notes of _The Defence of Lucknow._