to bind the brow of the little child. Is it of affection or passion, in the depth of their tenderness or the might of their burning, that he speaks? He shows you the eyelid of the mother quivering, and every little flutter, of love and doubt, in the breast of the village bride. Or the irresistible emotion reddens over cheek and brow, like a northern morning, and the inmost secrets of the spirit dawn out in the dark of the hazel eye. He seems to track the blood in the veins as it courses from the heart to the cheek. The bride in The Lord of Burleigh has just heard the announcement, that the landscape painter whom she had loved is a great and wealthy noble. Tennyson does not say how she was impressed. He merely looks at her and reads off the signs on her face.

"All at once the color flushes

Her sweet face from brow to chin:
As it were with shame she blushes,
And her spirit changed within.

Then her countenance all over
Pale again as death did prove."

This is all. You hear, in a little, how she strove against her weakness, and addressed herself to her wifely duties, but of her feelings at the time you hear nothing. The characters in which nature wrote those feelings are set before the eye; and how vivid, how profound their portraiture, how delicate and deep their pathos!

Tennyson's diction and melody are in perfect harmony with his imaginative faculty. To describe his command of language, by any ordinary terms, expressive of fluency or force, would be to convey an idea both inadequate and erroneous. It is not only that he knows every word in

the language suited to express his every idea; he can select with the ease of magic the word that of all others is best for his purpose: nor is it that he can at once summon to his aid the best word the language affords; with an art which Shakspeare never scrupled to apply, though in our day it is apt to be counted mere Germanism and pronounced contrary to the genius of the language, he combines old words into new epithets, he daringly mingles old colors to bring out new tints that never were on sea or shore. His words gleam like pearls and opals, like rubies and emeralds. He yokes the stern vocables of the English tongue to the chariot of his imagination, and they become gracefully bril liant as the leopards of Bacchus, or soft as the Cytherean doves. He must have been born with an ear for verbal sounds, an instinctive appreciation of the beautiful and delicate in words, hardly ever equalled. His earliest poems are festoons of verbal beauty, which he seems to shake sportively, as if he loved to see jewel and agate and almondine glittering amid tropic flowers. He was very young when he published the Recollections of the Arabian Nights; yet that piece displays a familiarity with the most remote and costly stores of the English language not exceeded in the same space by Spenser. If these expressions seem to any extravagant, I would beg to suggest a study of two poems;

-I might name twenty. Consider Eleanore and The Lotos Eaters. Both these poems are every way characteristic of Tennyson, and illustrate admirably his imaginative method. I regard them, in respect of diction, as not only justifying every word I have said, but as putting utterly to shame my attempts to convey an adequate impression of Tennyson's power over words. Here I cannot quote single verses; for there are no degrees in perfection; and the most minute acquaintance with these

poems leaves me deliberately unable to point to a line in either, of which the diction is not absolutely perfect. In the case of Eleanore I can just imagine it objected, that the ambition of the diction overleaps itself and falls on the other side, that the skill of the poet, like the inimitable finish of Lewis on the dress of an uninteresting woman, is expended so lavishly on robes and jewelry, that the serene imperial Eleanore fails to concentrate our regard. But of The Lotos Eaters, this cannot be even argued. As you read that poem, you are so steeped in its golden langor, you are so overpowered by the trance-like joy of its calm, that you cannot think even of the spell that binds you. The force of language could no further go.

Tennyson's choice of measure, and general sense of rhythm and melody, correspond accurately with the order of his imagination, and the pearly delicacy of his diction. It, too, generally requires, for its full appreciation, an ear that will listen carefully, and even permit itself to be tuned to the melody. There is rarely that instantaneous attractiveness, which a well known measure, handled with any novelty or skill, is sure to possess; an attractiveness to be deemed analogous to that superficial beauty, which clearness and elegance impart to prints in annuals, and soft, well contrasted lights and shades to pictures generally. There is no reliance on antithesis, as is so common in the smaller lyrics of Byron. There is no courting of anapestic buoyancy, or voluptuous sweetness, as in the lyrics. of Moore. In almost every case, the radical metrical foot is the iambus, that most deeply consistent with the genius of the English tongue, but that, also, affording the poet the least resource in dashing turns or sounding cadences, and forcing him to trust most exclusively to his real power, to the gold seen gleaming beneath the pellucid current of

his verse. Locksley Hall is a magnificent exception to Tennyson's general habit, its trochaic measure being superbly adapted for the expression of passion, and itself being incomparably the finest of trochaic melody in the language. But though Tennyson's measures are generally iambic, he breathes into them a melodiousness which is new, and gives them forms of his own. The stanza of The Palace of Art is quite new, and it is only by degrees that its exquisite adaptation to the style and thought of the poem is perceived. The ear instinctively demands, in the second and fourth lines, a body of sound not much less than that of the first and third; but in Tennyson's stanza, the fall is complete; the body of sound in the second and fourth lines is not nearly sufficient to balance that in the first and third; and the consequence is, that the ear dwells on the alternate lines, especially on the fourth, stopping there to listen to the whole verse, to gather up its whole sound and sense. I do not know whether Tennyson ever contemplated scientifically the effect of this. I should think it far more likely, and indicative of far higher genius, that he did not. But it appears to me that no means could be conceived for setting forth, to such advantage, those separate pictures, "each a perfect whole," which constitute so great a portion of the poem. Wherever the picture to

be drawn is spread over several stanzas, or the same precise strain of feeling is kept up for so long, the form of the verse is felt to be by no means equally suitable, and the ear, accustomed to the deep rest of the full stop after the short line, will hardly consent merely to stop a moment at a comma, and then hasten to the succeeding verse. But it is a poor business analyzing verse like this, or attempting to reduce it to scientific rules. It is like trying to convey an idea of a flower, by enumerating its stamens and tissues,

or by presenting it, dried and shrivelled, with its name beside it, in some adust herbarium: instead of holding it up to the living eye, arrayed in that dress of purple, or blue, or scarlet, which God taught it to weave for itself from the sunbeams, or inhaling that fragrance, which eludes, like a spirit, the rude touch of science. Better is it, in thinking of the melodiousness of Tennyson's poetry, to recall those hours, so intensely, so serenely happy, when gradually the ear came under its spell: when the miller's daughters, and gardener's daughters, first glided into the field of vision, to tender, mildly cheerful music; when the Dream of Fair Women, and The Lotos Eaters, and The Palace of Art, almost hushed the beatings of the heart, at the flute-like softness and dreamy calm of their melody; when the tropic lightnings of passion first flashed amid the thunder of Locksley Hall; or when the great autumnal sorrow of In Memoriam, voiced itself in a rhythm, solemn and majestic as the roll of the melancholy main. The melody of Tennyson's poems is perhaps more peculiarly his own even than his other characteristics; it is still more difficult than in the case of these, to find its prototype in preceding English poetry.

We have hitherto, strictly speaking, considered only the methods and appliances of Tennyson's genius. His form of imaginative exertion, his diction, and his melody, are perfectly separable, in critical consideration, from the emotions he portrays, the thought he utters, or the new aspects of nature's beauty to which he opens our eyes. Expression is, in a sense, everything in poetry, as painting is in a sense everything in the pictorial Art: in the sense, namely, that, whatever thought and feeling may be exhibited, without metrical expression, in the one, or pictorial expression, in the other, loses the distinctive characteristic, however much