ABSTRACT
Recently I needed the text of Tennyson’s lines on Milton. My Milton Dictionary (1961) 1 says that the title is “Milton.” Taking down from my shelf the standard Macmillan one-volume Works of Tennyson (1913), I looked in the Index of Titles. No “Milton,” no “On Milton.” Would it be necessary to riffle through 878 pages? I turned to the index to W.R. Parker’s biography of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), a marvel of comprehensiveness, but for once it let me down. Next I tried the index (London: Macmillan, 1894) to David Masson’s six-volume biography and was referred to 6, 555, where the lines are quoted. But no title is given. Masson just calls it a “Horatian ode.” Nothing of the sort is listed in the Macmillan Tennyson. Staring at Masson’s quotation, “O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,” etc., I progressed to the Macmillan Index to the First Lines and was enabled to find the poem on page 237. It is indeed headed “MILTON” and underneath that, “Alcaics.” But “Alcaics” is not in the Index of Titles either. The only title given countenance is the group title, “In Quantity.” Who would ever have threaded that maze to Tennyson’s once-famous lines?
