work of the stimulative imagination. But it is quite impossible for the same sort of perusal to suit both the modes of imagination. In the one case, the single word or metaphor produces its own effect, and there an end. In the other case, word must find its word, stanza must be, swiftly or slowly, collated with stanza. If all the limbs and features of the body, in a human delineation, are specified in their true forms and colors; if all the parts of an edifice architecturally correspond; the scattered members can unite into one living frame, the separate courts and galleries into one palace. But if the delineative poet has, in the course of his perilous enumeration, put an arch where there should be a pillar, or a battlement where there should be a rampart, his edifice is strictly a heap of disjointed rubbish. If the reader's imagination refuses to follow the poet in meek obedience, the whole becomes, whether correct in itself or no, an unintelligible mass of confusion, or an unimpressive blank. The descriptions of Spenser, Keats, and Tennyson are literally too clear to be instantly comprehended; dark with excess of light. Only be silent and listen to such poets and they will tell you far more than that their mansions are stately, their forests rich in light and shade, their maidens sweet and rosy. The indefinite, flickering light of your own imagination is sternly shorn away: but by degrees the creation of the poet, resting calm as against the sky of dawn, every crystal spire unchangeably fixed, every golden pillar standing immovable, rises before you and remains forever.

It is a tempting question, which of these orders of delineation demands the greater power and is essentially the greater. Perhaps they are co-ordinate. I confess that, though the delight I have received from such descriptions as those of Spenser, Keats, and Tennyson, has been inex

pressibly intense, I am inclined to yield to the voice of humanity, which has, in all ages, accorded supreme popularity to the poets of the first class. From Homer to Byron, those poets have exercised the most potent influence over the mass of men, whose touch has been sweeping, who have delighted in broad masses of shade and sunshine, who have scattered imaginative spells rather than finished imaginative pictures. Viewed abstractly, however, the case on the other side is exceedingly strong. If imagination works perfectly in every detail, and yet unites her whole composition in living harmony, is it fair to impugn the supremacy of her might, because the human eye, dazzled, it may be, by false glories, turbid through ignoble admirations, and incapable of a long, calm gaze, fails to take in the magnificent sweep of her lines, to perceive the elaborate correspondence of her colors? Beyond question, the higher the scale of culture, the higher is the pleasure found in the work perfect in its minuteness as well as in its majesty; beyond question, too, the poets who have delighted in such work, Dante perhaps excepted, have depended more, for their power of fascination, on their pure sense of beauty, than on the breadth of their human sympathies or power of general interest. The sense of abstract loveliness was possessed by Spenser and Keats as strongly and as exquisitely as by any men that ever lived. It might be urged, too, that, in this form of imaginative exertion, the sister Arts, poetry and painting, meet, while the indefinite imagination affords no forms or colors which the painter can follow. The ideal end of painting as an Art, and that of the Spenserian imagination, to reveal beauty in perfect form and color, are identical. Of all painters, in landscape at all events, Turner, on a great scale, and old David Cox on a less, have alone, so far as I

can remember, attempted in form and color the suggestiveness and mystery of the stimulative imagination. But here, it is to be feared, Poetry might step in, arrayed in her most gorgeous robes, and declare, with a smile of haughty disdain, that Turner and Cox merely struggled into her empyreal freedom above the constraints of the inferior Art, and that the imagination, which catches a gleam from the infinite, and transcends any definite form of color to be rendered by human hand, is, after all, the grander of the two.

The description of the palace in the poem we have been contemplating, is perhaps sufficient for our purpose. But every stanza is of the same order. A few of them I cannot forbear from quoting.

"Full of great rooms and small the palace stood,

All various, each a perfect whole

From living Nature, fit for every mood

And change of my still soul.

For some were hung with arras green and blue,

Showing a gaudy summer-morn,

Where with puff'd cheek the belted hunter blew
His wreathed bugle-horn.

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

Who paced forever 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.

Or sweet Europa's mantle blew unclasp'd,
From off her shoulder backward borne:

From one hand droop'd a crocus: one hand grasp'd
The mild bull's golden horn.

Or else flush'd Ganymede, his rosy thigh
Half-buried in the Eagle's down,

Sole as a flying star shot through the sky
Above the pillar'd town."

I doubt whether it is within the limit of possibility to bestow too high a commendation upon these delineations, unsurpassed as they are in the whole range of art. Each stanza is a poem. Each stanza exhibits a strength and

calmness of imaginative vision, a sense of symmetry and proportion, in one word a capacity to see and delineate the Beautiful, which would render it, if found separately, as infallibly demonstrative of supreme poetic genius. A single gem, of unparalleled loveliness, tells of the one mine in all the world where it can have been dug. Of the mastery of the English language which concentrated so many complete pictures into such frames it is needless to speak. But how distinctly traceable in every line is the hand of the finishing imagination! What can you add to that figure of Europa? Her mantle is unclasped and borne backward from her shoulder. The crocus droops from one hand; the other grasps the horn of the bull, the horn being golden and the bull mild. The one epithet which might be regarded as a signal of freedom to the imagination, "sweet," hardly releases you here, for you can imagine only a quiet, contented, hoping smile. This little picture has always seemed to me to reveal the genius of Tennyson to the very life, Tennyson, his mark.

It would be a very delightful but is not a necessary task, to trace the imaginative action, of which I have said so much, through all the poems of Tennyson, whether his earlier or his later. For the present I confine myself to the former, and even of these I can in this connection say but a few words. Observe how the poet always gazes face to face upon what he portrays, how distinctly he hears every word falling from the lips of his characters. He never slurs, he never generalizes. Is he in his idyllic mood, wandering by the brook or among the hay-cocks? He sees the apple-blossom as it sails on the rill; the garden walk is bordered with lilac; the green wicket is in a privet hedge. He lets you hear the very words of the simple, kindly rustics, and you see the flowers plucked for the wreath