to FitzGerald of ‘Tiresias,’ Tennyson, after recalling his visit to him and the attempt to follow his host in a spare vegetable diet, concludes that—

But the golden Eastern lay was not all Eastern and Oriental. The last stanza, for example, is not Omar at all, but is almost undiluted FitzGerald —and there is much of FitzGerald’s independent philosophy in the poem as we read it;—now there is a stanza that recalls Homer, now a line that suggests a passage in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and here again an expression that makes one think of a saying in Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann. The more than original imagery with which FitzGerald has enriched Omar’s work, and the sustained charm of an original verse-measure make the ideas of the poem appear full of vivid life. These, indeed, centre on the greatest and most pathetic problem known to man; his own existence and his destiny which saddened Virgil—

and which Omar with all his seeking intelligence was impotent to solve, as he resentfully but with pain confesses:—

CLEMENT K. SHORTER.