To hear each other's whispered speech; To watch the c. isp.ug ripples on the beach, To lend our hearts and spirits wholy To the influence of mild-minded melancholy; Heaped over with a mound of grass, Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass! The most prominent defects in these volumes of Mr. Tennyson were occasional quaintness and obscurity of expression, with some incongruous combinations of low and familiar with poetical images. — His next work, The Princess, a Medley,' appeared in December 1847. This is a story of a prince and princess contracted by their parents without having seen each other. The lady repudiates the alliance; but after a series of adventures and incidents as improbable and incoherent as the plots of some of the old wild Elizabethan tales and dramas, the princess relents and surrenders. The mixture of modern ideas and manners with those of the age of chivalry and romancethe attempted amalgamation of the conventional with the real, the farcical with the sentimental-renders 'The Princess' truly a medley, and produces an unpleasant grotesque effect. Parts of the poem, however, are sweetly written; there are subtle touches of thought and satire, and some exquisite lyrical passages. Tennyson has nothing finer than these stanzas: Song, The Splendour Falls.' The splendour falls on castle walls, Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Ohark. O hear! how thin and clear, O love, they die in yon rich sky. They faint on hill or field or river: And grow for ever and for ever. Blow. bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying; The poet's philosophy as to the sexes is thus summed up: For woman is not undeveloped man But diverse: could we make her as the man. Not like to like, but like in difference. Yet in the long years liker must they grow; The man be more of woman, she of man; He gain in sweetness and in moral height, Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world: In 1850 appeared, at first anonymously, 'In Memoriam,' a volume of short poems, divided into sections, but all devoted, like the Sonnets of Shakspeare, to one beloved object-a male friend. Mr. Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, and affianced to Mr. Tennyson's sister, died at Vienna in 1833, and his memory is here embalmed in a series of remarkable and affecting poems, no less than one hundred and twenty-nine in number, and all in the same stanza. This sameness of subject and versification would seem to render the work monotonous and tedious; so minute a delineation of personal sorrow is also apt to appear unmanly and unnatural. But the poet, though adhering to one melancholy theme, clothes it in all the hues of im ́agination and intellect. He lifts the veil, as it were, from the inner life of the soul; he stirs the deepest and holiest feelings of our nature; he describes, reasons, and allegorises; flowers are intermingled with the cypress, and faith and hope brighten the vista of the future. His vast love and sympathy seem to embrace all nature as assimilated with his lost friend. Thy voice is on the rolling air; I hear thee where the waters run; And in the setting thou art fair. The ship containing his friend's remains is thus beautifully apostrophised: In Memoriam, IX. Fair ship, that from the Italian shore, Sailest the placid ocean-plains So draw him home to those that mourn All night no ruder air perplex Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright As our pure love, through early light Shall glimmer on the dewy decks. Sphere all your lights around, above; Sleep gentle heavens before the prow; Sleep gentle winds as he sleeps now, My friend, the brother of my love! My Arthur, whom I shall not see Till all my widowed race be run; Arthur Hallam was interred in Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, situated on a still and sequestered spot, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel:* Memoir prefixed to Arthur Hallam's Remains, by his father, the historian. An interesting account of this volume is given by Dr. John Brown. Edinburgh, in Hora Subserire Arthur Henry Hallam was born in London. February 1. 1811. He distinguished himself at Eton and at Trinity College. Cambridge, and was anthor of several essays and poetical productions, which gave promise of future excellence. Ile died in his twenty-third year, September 15, 1833. The Danube to the Severn gave The darkened heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave. There twice a day the Severn fills; The salt sea-water passes by, And hushes half the babbling Wye, And makes a silence in the hills. We add one of the sections, in which description of external nature is finely blended with the mourner's reminiscences: In Memoriam, XXII. The path by which we twain did go, Which led by tracts that pleased us well, Through four sweet years arose and fell, From flower to flower, from snow to snow: And we with singing cheered the way, And crowned with all the season lent, From April on to April went, And glad at heart from May to May: As we descended following hope, There sat the shadow feared of man; Who broke our fair companionship, And spread his mantle dark and cold; And wrapt thee formless in the fold, And dulled the murmur on thy lip, And bore thee where I could not see Nor follow, though I walk in haste; And think that somewhere in the waste. The shadow sits and waits for me. But where the path we walked began Our father's dust is left alone And silent under other snows. With the genial season, however, is sympathies expand, and in one section of noble verse he sings the dirge of the old year and the advent of the new: In Memoriam, CVI. Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, 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, Ring out false pride in place and blood, Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; The larger heart, the kindlier hand: Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be. The patriotic aspirations here expressed are brought out more fully in some of Mr. Tennyson's political lyrics, which are animated by true wisdom and generous sentiment. The next publication of our author was an Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington' (1852)—a laureate offering, which he afterwards revised and improved, rendering it not unworthy of the hero or the poet. The Funeral of the Great Duke. O give him welcome, this is he, With blare of bugle, clamour of men, In 1855 appeared Maud, and other Poems'-the first, an allegorical vision of love and war, treated in a semi-colloquial bizarre style, yet suggestive and passionate. Maud is the daughter of the squire, and in the light of her youth and her grace' she captivates a mysterious misanthropic personage who tells the story. But Maud has another suitor, a new-made lord,' whose addresses are favoured by Maud's father and brother-the latter described as That jewelled mass of millinery, That oned and curled Assyrian bull. The squire gives a grand political dinner, a gathering of the Tory,” to which the Timon-lover is not invited. He finds, however, in the rivulet crossing his ground, a garden-rose, brought down from the Hall, and he interprets it as a message from Maud to meet her in the garden among the roses at night. He proceeds thither, and invokes the fair one in a lyric which is unquestionably the charm of the volume. It begins: Come into the garden. Mand, For the black bat. night. has flown. Come into the garden, Mand, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown. Maud obeys the call; but her brother discovers them, insults the intruder, and a duel ensues, in which the brother is slain. The lover E. L. v. 7-5 flees to France, but returns to England, for ever haunted by visions of Maud, and then, in another section, we are startled to find him declare himself dead, long dead,' and buried, but without finding peace in the grave! It is a vision, and the dreamer obtains a new excitement; he rejoices to think that a war is arise in defence of the right: And the image: That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease, And I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly Far into the north, and battle, and seas of death. Tyrtaan war-strain closes with a somewhat fantastic And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep, 'Maud' was the least successful of Mr. Tennyson's longer poems. But three years afterwards (1858) the poet redeemed himself by the publication of The Idylls of the King,' consisting of four poems— Enid,' 'Vivien,'' Elaine,' and 'Guinevere.' This Arthurian romance was completed in 1869, by another volume, entitled 'The Holy Grail,' and including The Coming of Arthur,' 'Pelleus and Etarre,' and The Passing of Arthur'-the whole of this Arthurian collection of idylls forming, according to Dean Alford, a great connected poem, dealing with the very highest interests of man,' King Arthur being typical of the higher soul of man,' as shewn in the king's coming, his foundation of the Round Table, his struggles, disappointments, and departure. Of the versification of the Idylls-pure, flowing, blank verse-we subjoin a brief specimen : From The Passing of Arthur.' Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere: |