and it is the reader's, not the poet's fault, if the wicked reflection will occasionally arise :

'Oh, Mirth and Innocence, oh, Milk and Water, Ye happy mixtures of these happy days.'

Mr. Tennyson's Nature differs from Byron's as a flower-piece by Van Huysum or an English landscape by Creswick differs from a Salvator Rosa or a Gaspar Poussin. In the elaborate minuteness of his finish, he may be compared to the painters of the pre-Raphaelite school, who (by a perverse abuse of power) convert their backgrounds into foregrounds, and make you look more at the roses and apple-blossoms than at the damsels who are embowered in them. Minute details are ruinous to great effects, and the poet who rises to sublimity must always rank above the one who simply attains to prettiness. The quality of the aspiration must cast the balance, assuming the execution to be equal. When Mr. Tennyson is moralising on a bending lily or describing the ripple of the rivulet, Byron is apostrophising a crashing forest or an avalanche, or pouring out his whole mind and soul in unison with the roar of the cataract and the

mountain capped with snow. He rises far the highest, and he continues longest on the wing.

We know from long experience that it is useless to refer. To produce the desired impression, or maintain the given argument, we must quote; and we shall quote three of the stanzas on Rome and the Coliseum as a specimen of the poet's power of enveloping the wrecks of vanished empires, the emblems of human vanity, with the halo which he flings around the rocks and valleys of the Alps :

'Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empire! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
What are our woes and sufferance? Come

and see

The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your

way

O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye! Whose agonies are evils of a day-

A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.

The Pantheon, St. Peter's, Venus de' Medici, the Laocoon, the Gladiator-all the finest creations of architecture and sculpture that Italy can boast-are similarly invested with the brightest or deepest hues of poetry. But we can only find room for the Apollo:'Or view the Lord of the unerring bow, The God of life, and poesy, and lightThe sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow All radiant from his triumph in the fight; The shaft hath just been shot-the arrow bright

With an immortal's vengeance; in his eye And nostril beautiful disdain, and might And majesty, flash their full lightnings by Developing in that one glance the Deity.

'But in his delicate form-a dream of Love, Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast

Long'd for a deathless lover from above, And madden'd in that vision—are exprest All that ideal beauty ever bless'd The mind with in its most unearthly mood, When each conception was a heavenly guestA ray of immortality-and stood, Starlike, around, until they gather'd to a god!'

There is hardly any variety of poetic power that may not be illustrated from Don Juan.' In the opinion of all competent judges, it forms the copestone of Byron's fame. But it confirmed the worst charges that had been of his writings, and thereby strengthened levelled against the spirit, tone, and tendency at this moment struggling, to the full recogthe bigoted opposition against which we are nition of his genius by his countrymen. The epithet, meanest,' attached to the name of a great philosopher, has been merged and forgotten in wisest,' brightest.' The recent attempt of an accomplished scholar and critic to gauge a great poet by his personal weaknesses has fortunately failed; but the spirit which denied Byron a place in Westminster Abbey is abroad and stirring; and it is melancholy to reflect what an amount of narrow-minded sectarian hostility was brought into mischievous activity by Mrs. Stowe. Hardly an American or foreign journal of note took her part, whilst a ma

Then came Keats, the alleged victim of a critique in this 'Review':

'Tis strange the mind that very fiery particle Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.' It was the 'literary lower empire' when (1830) Tennyson made his first appearance, diffident and sensitive, in the arena :

'First Fear his hand, its skill to try,
Amid the cords bewilder'd laid,
And back recoil'd, he knew not why,
Ev'n at the sound himself had made.'

His reception was not encouraging, despite of an applauding circle of young friends; and his earliest poems, if not actually withdrawn, were suffered to remain out of print for some years, by way of testing the patience of the general public, or to punish them. It was not till after the collected edition of 1842 that he began to be looked upon as the poet of the epoch, or was talked of for the laureate throne. Except amongst the older race of critics, who remained obdurate and unappreciating, the finer qualities of his genius were then frankly recognised

* Barry Cornwall (Procter).

When Tennyson published his first poems, the critics spoke ill of them. He was silent during ten years no one saw his name in a review, nor even in a catalogue. But when he appeared again before the public, his books had made their way alone and underground, and at the first bound he passed for the greatest poet of his country and his time.'-(Taine, vol. iv. p. 432.) Mr. Tennyson's first publication was in 1830; his second in 1832; his third in 1842. As the first and second comprised many of the minor poems most distinctive of his genius, it would be curious to inquire to what change in the public mind it was owing that what was coldly or slightingly received in 1830 and 1832 elicited such enthusiastic applause in 1842.

at once.

With an inexhaustible fancy, an exquisite perception of moral and natural beauty, a well stored and highly cultivated mind, a trained eye for observation, a rich vocabulary, and a familiarity with rhythmical composition acquired in a long apprenticeship to the craft, what more was wanting to entitle him to the throne? He wanted spontaneity and continuity; his productions were laboured and disconnected; little interest was felt beyond that of picking out the abounding pearls and rubies at random strung; the incidents were commonplace; the reflections lay upon the surface; the groundwork was too thin for the embroidery; the foundations were not broad or strong enough for the superstructure; there was no tained rush or flow, although we were met linked sweetness long drawn out; no susat every turn by fountains or jets that sparkled in the moonlight or flashed in the sun. Why did he not carry out the fine conception of The Poet':

'Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love.

To realize a noble dream like this there must be a set purpose, an appointed goal, a comprehensive plan, an intense earnestness, a pride of genius which will not consent to be frittered away, which will not complacently accept exaggerated congratulations and applause even for the production of such charming specimens of the poetic art as

Enone,' 'The Miller's Daughter,' 'A Dream of Fair Women,' 'Locksley Hall,' or (a formidable rival to Christabel ') The Lady of Shalott.'

Most of Byron's poems were the result of a sudden inspiration, eagerly followed out: he struck, and continued striking, whilst the iron was hot. He never, like Pope, stopped waiting for his imagination for weeks; and he compared himself to the tiger, which, when the first spring fails, withdraws into the jungle with a growl. Mr. Tennyson leaves the impression of a diametrically opposite habit. We can conceive him working doggedly against the grain, and overlaying a description, a narrative, or a train of thought, which he had better have left as it originally suggested itself or left alone altogether,

'The Palace of Art' is overdone;; The Two Voices' is weakened by dilution :: the best of the 'May Queen' is "The Con

clusion'; and there are verses in The Miller's Daughter' which, diffusely sentimental, ill-harmonise with such as these:

'I loved the brimming wave that swam
Thro' quiet meadows round the mill,
The sleepy pool above the dam,

The pool beneath it never still.

'The meal-sacks on the whiten'd floor,

The dark round of the dripping wheel, The very air about the door

Made misty with the floating meal.'

Amongst Byron's memoranda, we find: 'What is Poetry? The feeling of a Former world and Future.' This is inconsistent with his general theory. In one of his letters, he says, in allusion to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Barry Cornwall, 'The pity of these men is that they never lived in high life nor in solitude; there is no medium for their knowledge of the busy or the still world.' In another, after declaring a strong passion to be the poetry of life, he asks:" What should I have known or written, had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting?' The highest quality of the highest genius is to dispense with exact knowledge of what it paints or shadows forth, to grasp distant ages by intuition like Shakespeare, or to pierce the empyrean with the mind's eye like Milton. But when a poet habitually mixes up his individuality with external objects, or draws largely on his own impressions and reminiscences, the tone of his poetry will necessarily be much influenced by his commerce with the world; and as Mr. Tennyson is fond of appearing in his own person in his works, he certainly lies under some disadvantage in this respect. He has never undergone the hard schooling of adversity: he has never stood with his household gods shattered round him: he has never been the mark of the public contumely. His bitterest complaint against the world is that the tourists have driven him from the Isle of Wight to Surrey he has never (we are persuaded) been the slave of guilty passion, nor (we would fain hope) the heart-broken victim of female inconstancy. It is fortunate for him that he has not: but what his domestic life has gained in sobriety, his poetry has lost in intensity; and his voice is mild as the sucking dove's when he communes with Nature or rails against mankind. In 'Locksley Hall,' for example, the desperate resolution to retire to some island in the ' shining Orient,' partakes a little of the bathos:

There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind,

In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.

which are rarely, if ever, found in the impul Laboured writing is liable to incongruities sive and spontaneous. We raise no ornithological objections to The Dying Swan'; but, assuming the poem to be allegorical, surely the comparison to a mighty people rejoicing is out of keeping and overstrained:The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul Of that waste place with joy

Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear
The warble was low, and full and clear;
And floating about the under-sky,
Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole
Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;
But anon her awful jubilant voice,
With a music strange and manifold,
Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold:
As when a mighty people rejoice
With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of
gold,

And the tumult of their acclaim is roll'd
Through the open gates of the city afar,
To the shepherd who watched the evening star.
And the creeping mosses and clambering
weeds,

And the willow-branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.'

In one of the fine stanzas on Waterloo and the associated events in the Third Canto of 'Childe Harold,' as originally written, were these lines:

'Here his last flight the haughty eagle flew, Then tore with bloody beak the fatal plain.' Reinagle sketched a chained eagle grasping the earth with his talons. On hearing this, Byron wrote to a friend, 'Reinagle is a bet ter poet and a better ornithologist than I am: eagles, and all birds of prey, attack with their talons, and not with their beaks, and I have altered the line thus:

"Then tore with bloody talon the rent plain." This is, I think, a better line, besides its poetical justice.' Would Mr. Tennyson, on being assured, on the high authority of Mr. Gould, that swans never sing, be prepared to pay a similar tribute to poetical justice and truth? or would he abide by the popular

and time-honoured error?

6

When Byron (in Don Juan) describes the career of a young noble and the life of May Fair, he writes con amore from personal knowledge of his subject, but when Mr. Tennyson takes us, in Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue,' to the Cock' in Fleet Street, it is obvious that he has no acquaintance with the old waiter, and no real sympathy with the frequenters of the place. He is more at home in the drawing-room than the tavern, and the high-born coquette is admirably hit

off:

'I know you, Clara Vere de Vere,

You pine among your halls and towers; The languid light of your proud eyes Is wearied of the rolling hours. In glowing health, with boundless wealth, But sickening of a vague disease, You know so ill to deal with Time,

You needs must play such pranks as these.

'Clara, Clara Vere de Vere,

If Time be heavy on your hands, Are there no beggars at your gate, Nor any poor about your lands? Oh! teach the orphan-boy to read, Or teach the orphan-girl to sew, Pray Heaven for a human heart,

And let the foolish yeoman go.'

In graceful play and redundancy of fancy, Mr. Tennyson's Mermen' and Mermaid' rival Mercutio's 'Queen Mab':

'I would be a merman bold:

I would sit and sing the whole of the day;
I would fill the sea-shells with a voice of power,
But at night I would roam abroad and play
With the mermaids in and out of the rocks,
Dressing their hair with the white sea-flower,
And holding them back by their flowing locks;
I would kiss them often under the sea,
And kiss them again till they kiss'd me-
Laughingly, laughingly.

And then we would wander away, away,
To the pale-green sea-groves straight and high,
Chasing each other merrily.'

We see no harm in these submarine gambols; but exception might be taken, without an excess of prudishness, to 'The Sisters,' in which sensual passion is coarsely blended with the sense of injured honour and revenge:

'I kiss'd his eyelids into rest :

His ruddy cheek upon my breast.

The wind is raging in turret and tree.
I hated him with the hate of hell,
But I loved his beauty passing well-
O the earl was fair to see!

We shall not differ much with Mr. Tennyson's discriminating admirers when we say that his fame might rest on 'In Memoriam,' like that of Petrarch on his 'Sonnets.' It is wonderful,-the variety of shapes in which the living and breathing spirit blends and tones they hold colloquy beyond the with the departed; in how many moods grave; what wealth of imagery is brought to gild the thronging memories; how we are made to taste the full luxury of woe! The Muse evoked by 'Il Penseroso' and reappears in her 'sweetest, saddest plight'; different, yet the same. There is no iteration; and the surprise of novelty enhances the melancholy pleasure till the last. Compare, for example, the manner in which the individual grief is illustrated in No. VIII., beginning A happy lover who has come,' with the swelling tide of feeling and lofty prophetic spirit of CV. on Christmas Eve:

'Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

appears

For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
'Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
'Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times,
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.'

Petrarch's Sonnets' do not raise him to the level of Dante, Tasso, or Ariosto: the highest place in every branch of creative genius must be reserved for those who combine breadth and comprehensiveness of design with felicity of execution: who, in short, idealise on a grand scale; and Mr. Tennyson's historic or pre-historic fragments (like the Morte d'Arthur' and 'Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere') were compared to the studies of a painter like Leonardi da Vinci or Raphael preparing for the Last Supper' or The Transfiguration.' It was probably to justify this hopeful and flattering comparison that he chose a larger canvas, concentrated his powers, and produced his more