There is a dreamy, indolent air about Tennyson's poetry, an evident want of tonic in the system, which, again, is quite in accordance with the temper of his times. His sympathy is wide and warm; but it is that of the conviction and the conscience, rather than of the will. His poetry-take his political and social allusions, for instance is full of the indications of noble instincts and true philosophy; but it comparatively interests itself little in right deeds. How rarely he deals with action at all! States of feeling, existing moods, quiescence; this is his natural ground. His is not the vis tragica. He has pathos, he has feeling; but his is not an intense and passionate nature; nor, with one or two remarkable exceptions, does he care to deal with such in his poetry. He stands aloof from the anguish and terror of the affections. He can touch the trials of the heart with a master's hand, but they must be those of the softer and more appeasable kind. It is in throwing a divine grace over the happier emotions, that his muse is most at home. She speaks nowhere so freely, perhaps nowhere so enchantingly, as in the “Gardener's Daughter." The same is true of his intellect. It wants neither breadth nor depth. Yet he is less remarkable for searching, original, and profound thoughts, than for his power of giving roundness and completeness to those which are before dimly discerned and half apprehended, but which he for the first time sets before us in their true significance and in their fairest aspect. He gathers and presents us a truth with the bloom on it. His thoughts, too, do not tread on one another's heels; they are never so crowded but that each can have a full and orderly development. The obscurity of "In Memoriam" does not arise from too thicklyswarming thoughts, but from the attempt to grasp too much in a very compressed phrase, and still more from the neglect of connecting links.

When we say Tennyson shares a vice of his age in being morbid, we use a current phrase which we suppose

carries something of a common impression to us all, but which nobody cares to define very clearly. Perhaps we mean, that he and all of us have a perverted tendency to take an undue interest in, and exaggerate the importance of, particular aspects of things which are such as lie apart from our wholesome, every-day life, the natural bent of our feelings, and the just and regular subjects of our attention. There is a trace of this in Tennyson's earlier writings here and there, and "Maud" overflows with it. If it be said that that poem is expressly devoted to the delineation of morbid character, the answer is, that a morbid tendency must have guided such a selection of a subject for art; and moreover that the treatment of it is morbid.

We have sufficiently vindicated Tennyson's right to a place in the nineteenth century, not unconfirmed by his actually existing there. Let us glance at the main characteristics of his artistical genius. He is at once the most creative, and the least dramatic of poets; the nearest to Shakspere, and the farthest from him. He has in the very highest degree the fundamental poetic impulse. He fuses all things, and golden shapes spring from his mould, with only the material in common with his ore; rather, ideas are sown in his brain, and spring up in concrete organic forms. The passion to reproduce in concrete wholes, constitutes, indeed, that fundamental poetic impulse which we have ascribed to him. He may be didactic, philosophical, oratorical, sentimental; but all these things he encloses in a golden ball of poesy. He may have, and often has, an ultimate moral object. This is by no means inconsistent with the highest effort of artistic production, as has been sometimes too easily assumed. It is true, you cannot comply with the conditions of art, you cannot have the feelings of the artist, if you drive directly by the medium of verse at a moral result or an intellectual conclusion; but you may have these for your ultimate object, and you may embody them in true poetic forms. Most satires, Donne's for instance, or Juvenal's,

C

are only forcible rhythmical castigation; Butler's "Hudibras," however, is a poem, and Swift's "Gulliver" has the same characteristic, though in prose. It is satire informing an imaginative body. Pope's Essays are moral, didactic, and in verse; Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy" is a moral poem. Dryden's "Hind and Panther," and the "Excursion," are instances where the imaginative embodiment is incomplete. There goes something more, however, than an imaginative mould to form a poem; the whole matter of it must be transmuted by the imagination. What this process is, it is not perhaps possible to describe; Coleridge, at least, would be the only man to attempt it; but we can all feel the result. We have more words for the opposite thing; we say it is dry, it is bald, it is prosaic. Tennyson has both these powers in the highest degree. In fact, he never writes mere verse, and is never prosaic. Whether it be thought or feeling he is expressing, he gives it a poetic body, and transfigures it in the light of a glowing imagination. The "Palace of Art" is a wonderful instance of an idea admirably adapted for poetic expression, developed in a poetic form, and with the utmost wealth of a powerful imagination, and a fancy that has scarcely a parallel in luxuriance. It was a daring flight to describe the Palace which a soul worshipping Beauty alone, should build up for her own enjoyment, and no poet since Shakspere could have filled it with so concentrated a wealth of adornment as is here gathered together; and when the soul is stricken in her high place, and the poet has to deal with the images of her despair, not less is every consecutive word instinct with the allpenetrating force of his genius.

66

Deep dread and loathing of her solitude

Fell on her, from which mood was born
Scorn of herself; again, from out that mood
Laughter at her self-scorn.

'What! is not this my place of strength,' she said,
'My spacious mansion built for me,

Whereof the strong foundation-stones were laid
Since my first memory?'

But in dark corners of her palace stood
Uncertain shapes; and unawares

On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood,
And horrible nightmares,

And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame,
And, with dim fretted foreheads all,

On corpses three-months old at noon she came,
That stood against the wall.

A spot of dull stagnation, without light,
Or power of movement, seem'd my soul,
'Mid onward-sloping motions infinite
Making for one sure goal.

A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand;
Left on the shore; that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white."

In this poem the images of beauty and terror task to the utmost the genius of the author, and the whole is moulded into a real poem; it is a tale, the history of a soul, the reproduction of life-yet it is based upon the perception of a moral truth, and devoted to developing that truth, the truth, namely, that for a soul to be absorbed in devotion to Beauty, even in its purest and most glorious aspects, the Beauty of Knowledge and the Beauty of Good, is for it to be false to something higher in its destination-that

"Not for this

Was common clay ta'en from the common earth,
Moulded by God, and temper'd with the tears
Of angels to the perfect shape of man."

The "Two Voices" is simply, in its essence, an argument on the grounds for believing in the immortality of the soul. Now imagine Pope dealing with this subject in the same method in which he develops his proposition,

that

"Two principles in human nature reign,—
Self-love to urge, and reason to restrain."

Or recall how Young conducts a somewhat similar argument :

"What am I? and from whence? I nothing know,
But what I am; and, since I am, conclude
Something eternal: had there e'er been nought,
Nought still had been: eternal there must be.
But what eternal? Why not human race?
And Adam's ancestors without an end?
That's hard to be conceiv'd; since ev'ry link
Of that long-chain'd succession is so frail;
Can every part depend, and not the whole?
Yet grant it true; new difficulties rise;
I'm still quite out at sea, nor see the shore.

Whence earth and these bright orbs ?-Eternal too?
Grant matter was eternal; still these orbs
Would want some other father :—much design
Is seen in all their motions,—all their makes;
Design implies intelligence, and art;

That can't be from themselves- -or man; that art
Man scarce can comprehend, could man bestow ?
And, nothing greater yet allow'd than man,
Who, motion, foreign to the smallest grain,
Shot through vast masses of enormous weight?
Who bid brute matter's restive lump assume
Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly?
Has matter innate motion? Then each atom,
Asserting its indisputable right

To dance, would form an universe of dust;

Has matter none? Then whence these glorious forms,
And boundless flights, from shapeless, and reposed?"

Contrast this with Tennyson's poem, certainly one of the noblest in the English language. Observe that what he does is to reproduce, in a concrete form, the position of man towards his hope of immortality, as discernible through intellectual efforts. And the mode in which this is done, so that the poem shall not be an argument like Young's, is to represent a living soul on the actual rack of this question, inspired with all those varied feelings that actually do possess a man in such a situation, and to conduct his reasonings, not to a dry logical inference, but a resulting status in the convictions and mood of