I fear it is too late, and I shall die.'

But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd,
Larger than human on the frozen hills.

He heard the deep behind him, and a cry

Before. His own thought drove him like a goad.
Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves

And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels-
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,

And the long glories of the winter moon."

The two last lines place you on the very spot: you see it almost with your bodily eyes. And marvellous is the power with which he can strike off these landscapes at a blow. In the "Palace of Art" are a series of professed descriptions of pictures, each in four lines, and yet this brevity is consistent with giving an impression of absolute completeness of detail.

"One seem'd all dark and red-a tract of sand,
And some one pacing there alone,

Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon.

One show'd an iron coast and angry waves.
You seem'd to hear them climb and fall
And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves,
Beneath the windy wall.

And one, a full-fed river winding slow

By herds upon an endless plain,

The ragged rims of thunder brooding low,
With shadow-streaks of rain.

And one, the reapers at their sultry toil.

In front they bound the sheaves. Behind
Were realms of upland, prodigal in oil,

And hoary to the wind.

And one, a foreground black with stones and slags,
Beyond, a line of heights, and higher

All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags,
And highest, snow and fire.

And one, an English home-gray twilight pour'd

On dewy pastures, dewy trees,

Softer than sleep-all things in order stored,

A haunt of ancient Peace."

Tennyson never generalises. He gives us not aspects of nature, but some one special aspect at a given place and time: he never paints scenery, but always some individual scene. He assigns special conditions to every incident. One of our old poets has thus described the dawning of day:

"Now the day begins to break,

And the light shoots like a streak
Of subtle fire; the wind blows cold,
While the morning doth unfold."

This might be anywhere. Not so with Tennyson.

"Till now the doubtful dusk reveal'd

The knolls once more where, couch'd at ease,
The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field:

And suck'd from out the distant gloom,
A breeze began to tremble o'er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume;

And gathering freshlier overhead,

Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said,

• The dawn, the dawn,' and died away ;
And East and West, without a breath,

Mix'd their dim lights, like life and death,

To broaden into boundless day."

Such a description of one of the changes from one state to another in Nature is rare in Tennyson. Usually in the natural as well as in the moral world, he prefers to paint things at rest. Some poets, Thomson for instance, occupy themselves rather with the natural changes, storms, the gathering of mists, the coming on of night, the falling of autumn leaves. The distinction is worth

noting, for it indicates a deep-seated difference in the
whole character of their genius. Instances of the power
to reproduce sounds are not of course so common,
not less striking. A single example will suffice.

"Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,

And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O sweet and far from cliff and scar,

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying;

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying."

but

Byron, when dealing with scenery, gives you, with great force and spirit, the most ordinary commonplace impressions produced by it; he intensifies the vague undiscerning glance with which we are apt to look at a perfectly new landscape. Wordsworth pierces to the deeper influences it has the power to exert, and reveals them to us. Tennyson gives it us as it is, and leaves it to make its own impression; but he is master of what that impression shall be. He reproduces Nature with matchless freshness and fidelity. Yet he rarely copies her. He is not dependent on the actual combinations he has seen. His creative power intervenes here again. You can only describe its operation by contrasting it with the workings of a different genius. Wordsworth's mind is investigatory. All his lifetime he was gazing on Nature, and trying to penetrate her subtle and mysterious depths, observing and recording the impressions she produced on himself; and the finest instances of his genius, and those which distinguish him from all others, are when, steeped himself to the core in the finest and profoundest of her influences, he can shadow forth in words the effect they produce. Wordsworth is the servant, the student, the worshipper of Nature; he presses into her shrine. Tennyson is her master; he controls, he wields her as an instrument. Wordsworth deciphers Nature; Tennyson uses her to interpret himself. Words

worth either tells us what he has gathered from her, or if he reproduce her, it is just as he has seen her; he describes an actual existing landscape. Tennyson creates a new landscape in such exquisite unison with his thought, that its power of arousing sentiment shall be the medium of expressing his thought with a delicacy nothing else could. He makes fresh scenery to match every change in his own mood. Wordsworth goes out to seek Nature. Tennyson is passive to her influences, simply recipient, not searchingly recipient like the other. He loves to "sit and let the sound of music creep in his ear.' Wordsworth is haunted by a restless desire to put Nature down in verse as he sees it. Tennyson troubles himself not; but she sinks into the depths of his memory, and his musing spirit has ever at hand an unfailing wardrobe of loveliest forms; and rich vestments lie waiting by the pillow of his sleeping thoughts. When Tennyson has to describe the lotos-eaters, he does not go in quest of the most probable natural scenery, he does not give us the Nile with the red hills and ever-flowing stream, and pointed pyramids, with here a hippopotamus, and there a crocodile, and a vivid description of white waterlilies; he makes them a land to suit their condition.

"In the afternoon they came unto a land,

In which it seemed always afternoon.

All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;

And some through wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

They saw the gleaming river seaward flow

From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops,
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,

Stood sunset-flush'd: and, dew'd with showery drops,
Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.

The charmed sunset linger'd low adown

In the red West: through mountain-clefts the dale
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Border'd with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow, set with slender galingale;

A land where all things always seem'd the same!
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,

The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came."

If he were a painter, we should say he had Claude's power of steeping a landscape with his own sentiment, combined with that absolute fidelity, which is the aim of our modern English landscape-painters.

Tennyson cannot be said to be a great master of rhythm. Verse is plastic in his hands: he can shape it with ease to his purposes, but he has none of that power by which Shakspere wrote every play of a different class in a different rhythm. He indulges in experiments, without attaining to any very good new thing. Nothing can reconcile us to the dislocation of the old alternate rhyme which we find in the "In Memoriam " and elsewhere. It appears to have been adopted from pure desire for novelty, and we cannot help thinking the experiment a marked failure. Two rhymes are lost, and the other two clash too close on the ear. Such a collocation is only fitted for dissyllabic rhymes. It may do in Italian, but the English would have been wise, even in their sonnets, to follow the example Shakspere set them. It will always remain a subject of regret, that the "In Memoriam "is defaced by the assumption of this unhappy form. Its inferiority is at once made apparent by comparing it with the proper alternate rhyme employed by the same poet, as in the "Palace of Art," the "Talking Oak," or "Lady Clare." Tennyson's verse, throughout, is not unfrequently spoiled by affectation and mannerism: that of "Maud' is often a mere butcher's-pony pace.

There is a harmony of sound in verse distinguishable from harmony of rhythm. Of this Tennyson is master.