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.

There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing-space;

I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

Iron-jointed, supple-sinew'd, they shall dive, and they shall run,

Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;

Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks,

Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books.'

The parody is really little more than an imi tation :—

'There the passions, cramp'd no longer, shall have space to breathe, my cousin ;

I will take some savage woman-nay, I'll take

at least a dozen.

There I'll rear my young Mulattoes, as the bondslave brats are reared;

They shall dive for alligators, catch the wild goats by the beard,

Whistle to the cockatoos, and mock the hairyfaced baboon,

Worship mighty Mumbo Jumbo in the Mountains of the Moon.'*

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:

*The Book of Ballads,' edited by Bon Gualtier, The Lay of the Lovelorn.'

'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?

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

The undergraduates (including the new arrivals) attend lectures and listen to a discourse such as Mr. John Stuart Mill might deliver on his favourite subject; to another that smacks of Darwin and Tyndall; to a third worthy of Lyell or Murchison. Between the lectures they converse with their fellow collegians on the topics that puzzled Milton's angels; and one of their pleasantest evening rambles ends thus :

'And then we turn'd, we wound About the cliffs, the copses, out and in, Hammering and clinking, chattering stony

1

near

Two Proctors leapt upon us, crying, “Names."

*

*

*

*

*

They haled us to the Princess where she sat
High in the hall: above her drooped a lamp,
And made the single jewel on her brow
Burn like the mystic fire on a mast-head,
Prophet of storm: a handmaid on each side
Bow'd toward her, combing out her long black
hair

Damp from the river; and close behind her stood

Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than

men,

Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain,

And labour. Each was like a Druid rock;

Or like a spire of land that stands apart

Cleft from the main, and wail'd about with mews.'

A companion picture to this has been painted by Byron in his description of the group of young ladies amongst whom Don Juan, disguised like the Prince, was unexpectedly introduced:

'Many and beautiful lay those around,

Like flowers of different hue, and clime, and root,

In some exotic garden sometimes found, With cost, and care, and warmth induced to shoot.

One with her auburn tresses lightly bound,

And fair brows gently drooping, as the fruit Nods from the tree, was slumbering with soft breath,

And lips apart, which show'd the pearls beneath.

The moon breaks, half unveil'd each further charm,

As, slightly stirring in her snowy shroud, Her beauties seized the unconscious hour of night

All bashfully to struggle into light.

'This is no bull, although it sounds so; for 'T was night, but there were lamps, as hath been said.

A third's all pallid aspect offer'd more

The traits of sleeping sorrow, and betray'd Through the heaved breast the dream of some far shore

Beloved and deplored; while slowly stray'd (As night-dew, on a cypress glittering, tinges The black bough) tear-drops through her eyes' dark fringes.

'A fourth as marble, statue-like and still,

a scene of confusion

And so she would have spoken, but there rose

A hubbub in the court of half the maids -Gather'd together: from the illumined hall Long lanes of splendour slanted o'er a press Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes, And rainbow robes, and gems and gemlike eyes,

And gold and golden heads; they to and fro Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, some pale,

All open-mouth'd, all gazing to the light,
Some crying there was an army in the land,
And some that men were in the very walls,

And some they cared not; till a clamour grew
As of a new-world Babel, women-built,
And worse-confounded: high above them

stood

The placid marble Muses, looking peace.'

the finer of the two. We need hardly say that there are many graceful flights of fancy, many pleasing bits of description, many happy epithets, many fine thoughts, scattered over The Princess; but the prosaic so predominates over the poetic element, that it fairly passes our comprehension how it ever passed muster as a whole. Byron certainly contrived to mix up an extraordinary variety of heterogeneous subjects in Don Juan;' but 'Don Juan' was composed in a mocking, laughing spirit: it runs over with wit and humour; and we should feel much obliged to any one who would point out either wit or humour in 'The Princess.'

These faults of subject and construction were carefully eschewed in 'The Idylls of

of three lurking robbers, and identically the same action is repeated. He kills them all, binds their armour on their horses, and issues exactly the same order to the uncomplaining wife:

These the women sang;

'He follow'd nearer still: the pain she had To keep them in the wild ways of the wood, Two sets of three laden with jingling arms, Together, served a little to disedge

The sharpness of that pain about her heart.'

He has a third encounter with an entire troop, whom he disperses with equal ease, after unhorsing their leader; and when he is

but peace;

No critic I-would call them masterpieces:
They mastered me.'

Fashion, we repeat, must always have a great deal to do with the popularity of any work of art that appeals to an acquired taste and affects independence of the ordinary sources of interest. Canning said that whoever pretended to prefer dry champagne to sweet, lied. This was going a little too far; but the preference is confined to a limited circle of connoisseurs with educated palates; and those who honestly prefer blank verse to rhyme are not more numerous than those who honestly prefer dry champagne to sweet. Then, again, Mr. Tennyson's tales of chivalry had none of the attractiveness of Scott's. The main narrative in each would merely have formed an episode in the genuine epic or regular romance. Although drawn from the same repository of traditional lore, and steeped in the same carefully-prepared dye, "The Idylls,' four in number, look like so many pieces of rich tapestry, worked after a pattern for separate panels. The more we study them, the more forcibly are we impressed with the fertility of the author's fancy, the purity and elevation of his general tone of mind, his insight into the best parts of human nature, his comparative ignorance of the worst, and the poverty of his inventive faculty in constructing or embellishing a fictitious narrative. Surely the adventures that befell Geraint and Enid, when she is undergoing her trials, might have been varied with advantage. Her first transgression of his strict command to precede him without speaking, is caused by the discovery of three knights in ambush. These, duly warned by her, he slays, strips of their armour, binds it on their horses, each on each,

'And tied the bridle-reins of all the three Together, and said to her, "Drive them on Before you;" and she drove them thro' the

waste.'

head in Enid's lap, he is suddenly roused by her sharp and bitter cry against an insult offered her by his enemy :

'This heard Geraint, and grasping at his sword, (It lay beside him in the hollow shield), Made but a single bound, and with a sweep of it

Shore thro' the swarthy neck, and like a ball The russet-bearded head roll'd on the floor. So died Earl Dorm by him he counted dead.'

We are content to read tales of chivalry in the same spirit as 'Don Quixote.' A knight of the Round Table (or the Table Round, as the exigencies of verse require it to be called throughout) would not be worth his salt if he could not demolish any number of assailants by his single arm, or cut off a giant's head at a sweep; but we cannot help thinking that 'Enid's task was beyond her strength, and that more appropriate and more original machinery might have been hit upon to place in broad relief the depth, purity, humility, and devotedness of a true woman's love, which we take to be the intended moral of Enid.' There is hardly an incident in the combats which may not have been suggested by Ivanhoe.' The lances of the assailants splinter against the breast of Geraint, as they splintered against the breast of Richard in Sherwood Forest; and Geraint sinks down, from the effects of a concealed wound, like Ivanhoe.

This is repeated in Elaine,' where Lancelot is similarly wounded in the melée, and leaves the field (like the Black Knight) without claiming the prize. But in the develop ment of fine feeling, relieved_by_natural weakness, Elaine' is unsurpassed. It was a difficult and delicate subject, the unresisted sway of an unrequited passion over a pure minded girl, the slave of her imagination and her heart, who falls in love with Lancelot, as Desdemona fell in love with Othello, for the deeds he had done and the soul that beamed in his face:-