Tennyson's poems; and the unequalled sketches of women that I
found there, while they had, with the rest of the book, a new and
abiding influence on my mind, were quite enough to show me my own fatal
incompetency in that line. I threw my verses away, never to resume them.
Perhaps I proved thereby the depth of my affection. Our mightiest feelings,
are always those which remain most unspoken. The most intense lovers and
the greatest poets have generally, I think, written very little personal
love-poetry, while they have shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of
the passion too painfully intimate to be spoken of in the first person.
But to escape from my own thoughts, I could not help writing something; and
to escape from my own private sorrows, writing on some matter with which
I had no personal concern. And so, after much casting about for subjects,
Childe Harold and the old missionary records contrived to celebrate
a spiritual wedding in my brain, of which anomalous marriage came a
proportionately anomalous offspring.
My hero was not to be a pirate, but a pious sea-rover, who, with a crew of
saints, or at least uncommonly fine fellows, who could be very manly
and jolly, and yet all be good Christians, of a somewhat vague and
latitudinarian cast of doctrine (for my own was becoming rapidly so),
set forth under the red-cross flag to colonize and convert one of my old
paradises, a South Sea Island.
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