his delicious melodies, his most delicate and divine simplicities, into their own pasteboard prose, and then cry out, Look at it! do you call that poetry?' The divinest gift of God, the most beautiful and loveliest of the skiey messengers vouchsafed us now, has been rated like a schoolboy that had stolen apples, before the desk of some tumid editor, who knows only the heaviest scale, making there too a mistake so egregious that the dim thought of it will haunt him.

Ah yes! this delicate loveliness has borne the shock of uglier monsters than the 'cataract seas;' slippery creatures have slid over it, and mere organic slime-that can but sting-has sought to hide it from the sun. But now has descended a serener hour,' and in the great choir of voices that proclaim their joy over it, the sneers of envy and the ineptitudes of incapacity are alike unheard.

Poetry, of late, presents itself, for the most part, in affiliated series. Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, to go no higher, come in a group from the Percy Ballads, Burns, and Cowper. Shelley affiliates himself to Coleridge, Keats to Shelley, and Tennyson to Keats. Three is the sacred number, the fundamental figure, the foot that scans the rhythmus of the universe. Omne trinum perfectum rotundum; all good things are three; and poets, as among the best, are no exception. But of all poetic triads, the last surely is the richest, the happiest, and the completest. Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson! No, not even in their own verses can we find a more harmonious and triumphant triplet. They are the Three Graces of English literature, and should never be found apart. They should be bound in a volume, whose very titleShelley, Keats, and Tennyson-were poetry.

'What!' we hear the commoner critics cry, do you dare to rank among dead and accepted classics, a mere living aspirant?' Not only that, but we dare to say that this living aspirant, as the ripest of the triad, must take precedence of these, his otherwise equal fellows. As completed bard indeed, and in consideration (with special reference to Wordsworth) of the richer humanity and wider universality of his range, Tennyson, perhaps, transcends the whole series of poets that separates him from Milton.

And if this be true, why should it not be said? Or why should it be said to the dead skull only, and not to the living face of him it touches? Right well know I that fame is half dis-fame;' so speaks the melancholy bard himself; why should we not soothe him by a word in season? Does not he do as much, and more, by us? If he feels that he walks with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies,' shall we not seek to disperse the insects? Shall we not seek, so far at least as a little willing shout may go, to drive off from him, if only for a moment, the long-necked geese of the world that are ever hissing dispraise?'

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That we should recognize no greatness but dead greatness! and that we can never see the real height of a man so long as he stands five feet so-and-so at our elbow! In the poet's own words, we 'judge all nature from her feet of clay, without the will to lift our eyes and see her godlike head, crowned with spiritual fire and touching other worlds.' When shall an uncalculating generosity return among us? When shall we embrace the beautiful, whence-ever it may come, and without let, without grudge, without reservation, call and cry and name it beautiful? Must only dulness have the benefit of praise? Must each new triumph of our fellow but freeze us into polite indifference that withholds its voice from him, or convert us into an obstructive wall that would baulk his hearing, even of the plaudits from without? Was it only 'at first starting,' according to Charles Reade, that Christians and artists loved each other?" This world is indeed mean; and in regard to many another besides Merlin, because he seems master of all art, it fain would make him master of all vice.'

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This meanness Tennyson, as much as any man that breathes, has known and seen and suffered. But he is brave withal, and will not cast himself beneath it: 'never yet,' he cries, was noble man but made ignoble talk; he makes no friend who never made a foe!' In his own work, indeed, he has had his own ample consolation, his own most rich reward. He that has filed so well such vast variety of measures, from Claribel' to Guinevere' has had no dull time of it. He who woo'd and won 'The Miller's Daughter;' who scorned the Lady Clara Vere de Vere;' who thrid the awe-hushed palace to the couch of Beauty;' who listened to the Stylite,' and who heard the deep voice of Ulysses' self; he that said of Lady Clare,' 'Oh, and proudly stood she up;' he that saw 'Godiva,' as he waited for the train at Coventry; that dwelt for years, an embowered nightingale, within the wail of In Memoriam; that sang the Princess;' and that chanted Maud;' that looked into the meek blue eyes of Enid,' the truest eyes that ever answered heaven;' he that has been privileged to gather and to grow in stature and in shape before the clear face of the blameless King,'-enough!-let the common cry of curs' deafen all the air-of living men, here surely is the crowned happiest! He surely, if any man, may dwell in a serene unreachable of all 'whose low desire not to feel lowest, makes them level all, and pare the mountain to the plain, to leave an equal baseness.'

We have said that Tennyson, as ripest, must take precedence both of Keats and Shelley; but we abase neither of these without a grudge. We know what they are without him, but not what he would have been without them. Both died so young too; Shelley at thirty, Keats at twenty-four. Had Tennyson's mortal sojourn been as short, is it probable that he would have inherited an equal fame?

fame? With him luckily, however-luckily for us-all has gone differently. They, though young, had done their work not badly, and they died; while he, who needed, and who needing, got, the southern slope-lands and the evening-red, has grown and ripened to the yellow and the heavy ear.

Yes, doubtless; Tennyson owes no light debt to Keats and Shelley; nor, indeed, are his obligations lighter to others of his predecessors. Not alone the splendour and the purity of Shelley, or the mellow notes of Keats, but Wordsworth's severe simplicity, Milton's divine abundance, Spenser's rich tenderness, these also, absorbed and assimilated, turn up like colours in the lustrous verse of Tennyson. Let us not be unjust to this last, however, because of his place in time. Who is it that has not had predecessors? Successive sequence holds of the very quality of the finite; and it is not right that we should impute it singly to any man. Homer himself, first lark that ever sang, would have raised an infinitely thinner note, had not echoes from still earlier makers' combiningly enriched it. We have only to look back upon our earliest ballads, charming as they are, to become aware of how much the metal of poesy gains in firmness, density, weight, and shape, under the successive hammers of a thousand workmen. And it is in the light of these thoughts that Tennyson must be looked at; for the reproach of imitation is not by any means legitimately his. From first to last, from Claribel' to 'Guinevere,' in 'Locksley Hall,' 'Godiva,' 'Lady Clare;' in the Ode to the Duke of Wellington, in Ulysses,' in The Stylite,' in Maud,' 'The Princess,' In Memoriam,' the Idylls,' it is neither Spenser nor Milton, neither Wordsworth nor Shelley nor Keats; it is Tennyson himself we see, Not Lancelot, nor another.'

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Still it is probable that the mastery of the craft has proved much more laborious to Tennyson than to either of his co-mates. It is not certain, indeed, that he has yet attained to those consecutive and uninterrupted numbers, to that growing, flowing, and accumulating verse for which both Keats and Shelley-and in the greater degree the latter are so remarkable. We refer not here to the narrative, which in Tennyson runs on ever with infinite grace of consecution, but to the metres and their peculiar sequence. Read Hyperion,' Alastor,' 'Comus;' one feels a certain swell, a certain continuous rising in the mere verse; the numbers are welded, they grow, flow, and accumulate. But one can hardly say as much, and in the same sense, for 'The Princess.' We get sight in this poem of a certain chequeredness rather; the oneness, the fusion of an improvised, extempore gush is rare in it; the hand of conscious elaboration seems to linger about it; one finds turns in it, the artificial quaintness of which rings with rhetoric. There is often a peculiar insertedness, indicative

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as it were, of the very process by which those 'jewels, five-wordslong, that on the stretch'd forefinger of all time, sparkle for ever,' were actually inlaid. There seems a certain impededness in the movement, a mincingness, a pretty mincingness, as if the feet were fettered-perhaps, like a sultana's, by ornament-to a certain reach. In short, to borrow words from the metaphysical category of Quantity, the orbit of Tennyson is a discretum rather than a continuum; the circle may, on the whole, be full, but it has been described, as it were, in a series of interrupted dots, and not in a single, fluent, unintermitted sweep. The regularity of the dots is hardly constant either: they are not always true to the curve, but look oblique; nor are they, in equal spaces, always equally numerous. If Keats, if Shelley, and, better still, if Milton, 'with his garland and his singing robes about him,' rise into the empyrean, sustained on one long gust of melody, Tennyson may be said to attain like regions as by a ladder of Jacob, the rounds of which are of celestial workmanship, but not the less rounds. The peculiarity alluded to is seen at its fullest, perhaps, in 'The Princess,' where, indeed, the express prettiness proper to an arabesque has raised it into accentuated prominence. Its source is undoubtedly the fastidious labour of the bard: our enjoyment of the poem is undisturbed, however, and any sense of labour that may linger in our ear, disappears in the flow of the narrative. Thorough study, in truth, might educe important results here; for Tennyson's very latest blank verse, though quite unobstructed whether by prettiness or the insertion of some too irresistible epithet, displays a similar peculiarity; and it is worth inquiry how far is it a conscious, how far is it an unconscious product? Perhaps, indeed, the discretum may have this advantage over the continuum, that it does not so soon cloy; for where are there poems in any literature that can be read with a less flagging interest than these Mauds,' Princesses,' and 'Idylls?'

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We leave here this inquiry, however, and return to our main interest.

The Idyll, or Idyl-for both spellings occur in these very poems, the one attaching itself to the Greek sidov and the latter to the Latin Idylium (sometimes Idyllium, however,) — is, on the whole, Tennyson's favourite form of rhythmical composition. In this predilection he is not alone however: the Idyll is the favourite form of Keats also, to whom Tennyson directly affiliates himself; and not only of Keats, but of the national poetry in general. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Cowper, Wordsworth-to name but thesc-are all eminently idyllic. The Idyll, indeed, is our national ideal. A discriminative French writer remarks of our English scenery, Rien de plus attendrissant que les paysages Anglais.' Perhaps, then, it is these landscapes that touch us; for it is certain Vol. 2.-No. 7.

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that we are not more remarkable for our factitious conventionalism than for our yearning towards the unsophisticated. We toil and moil through life in a thousand unsightly avenues-trade, commerce, profession, office, position-but at the end of each there smiles for us an Idyll: home, the country, trees, fields, and running waters, a purer life with simpler manners and a ruddier health. The national poetry takes the national stamp; and, in this respect, the compositions of Tennyson exhibit a deeper impression, perhaps, than those of any other of our poets. The best of his miscellaneous poems are inscribed, English Idyls;' and now his latest and most finished work he names, Idylls of the King. With such authority before us, we may venture to extend the word to Maud' and The Princess' also; and in that case, Tennyson's poems will be seen to be all-or all but allIdylls.

According to some critics, however, the word relates to the common, and is misapplied to kings and princesses. We do not see the validity of the objection: it is not certain that poetry relates to the common at all, and it is quite certain that the essence of the Idyll is, that it should be a little picture-poem with nature in the background, and in the foreground, men and women of primitive and simple nobleness. In the sense of this definition, it will be evident to every reader that the term is admirably appropriate to the poems before us; and an examination of these poems themselves will abundantly demonstrate the legitimacy of their claim to an equality of place beside the very highest of the class.

These poems range over a period of some thirty years, and present, as might be expected, a series of gradations from the crudity of poetic youth to the full maturity of poetic manhood. The poet, one would think, however, must have largely burned his juvenilia, or, at all events, have subsequently re-worked and reformed them with unusual diligence and success, for there are but few poems in his collections that can be considered representative of the earliest stages of the art. Even Claribel,' we fancy, has been left to show the point of departure only-just as we see in cuttings, detached round mounds left standing, useless surely unless to indicate the original surface. The progressive rise from such mere callow sparrow-cheep as 'mavis dwelleth,' 'wave outwelleth,' 'throstle lispeth,' 'runnel crispeth,' 'grot replieth,' &c., to that most grand and inspired strain that closes The Princess,' or to that other, grander, perhaps, and more inspired, that is the climax of Guinevere'-this progressive rise, as conceived between such extremes, is even infinite. Claribel' is almost alone, however, and there is scarcely another poem in the collection on so low a level.

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