ABSTRACT
Published 1830; ‘Juvenilia’. A ‘character’ after Theophrastus, epigrammatically combining a moral temperament and a personal sketch. It is on Thomas Sunderland (1808–67), who was at Trinity College with T. and was ‘a very plausible, parliament-like, and self-satisfied speaker at the Union’ (FitzGerald). He won the Trinity declamation prize in 1829. Hallam listed him among the ‘crack speakers’ at the Union, and called him ‘wonderfully fluent: his principles appear to be Benthamite and but very ambiguously Christian’ (to J. M. Gaskell, 5 Nov. 1828); Sunderland’s mind failed shortly after he left Cambridge in 1830 (AHH, pp. 241–2). On Sunderland, see also P. Allen, The Cambridge Apostles (1978), ch. 3: ‘Thomas Sunderland and the Cambridge Union’. Sterling wrote of ‘his general cold superciliousness’, and Kemble (to W. B. Donne, 13 Jan. 1829) wrote: ‘he has already mounted up through presentations, sensations, conceptions and notions and cognitions within sight of the Deity, and thinks Christianity a very fair style of thing, and the Trinity a tolerably passable notion’ (p. 41). Written 1829 or early 1830, when T.’s friends Richard Monckton Milnes and J. W. Blakesley complained of Sunderland’s zest for ‘perfect solitude’ and his ‘direct contemplation of the absolute’ ( Joyce Green, The Development of the Poetic Image in Tennyson, Cambridge thesis, 1954). In his review of 1842 in the Church of England Quarterly Review (Oct. 1842), Leigh Hunt wrote: ‘We look upon the above, after its kind, as a faultless composition; and its kind is no mean one. Considered as a poetical satire, it brings an atmosphere of imagination round the coldest matter of fact; and the delicate blank effect of the disposition of the rhymes completes the seemingly passionless exposure of its passionless object.’ With a half-glance upon the sky At night he said, ‘The wanderings Of this most intricate Universe Teach me the nothingness of things.’ Yet could not all creation pierce Beyond the bottom of his eye. He spake of beauty: that the dull Saw no divinity in grass, Life in dead stones, or spirit in air; Then looking as ’twere in a glass, He smoothed his chin and sleeked his hair, And said the earth was beautiful. He spake of virtue: not the gods More purely, when they wish to charm Pallas and Juno sitting by: And with a sweeping of the arm, And a lack-lustre dead-blue eye, Devolved his rounded periods. Most delicately hour by hour He canvassed human mysteries, And trod on silk, as if the winds Blew his own praises in his eyes, And stood aloof from other minds In impotence of fancied power. With lips depressed as he were meek, Himself unto himself he sold: Upon himself himself did feed: Quiet, dispassionate, and cold, And other than his form of creed, With chiselled features clear and sleek.
