To us Tennyson's Ulysses' has always shared something of this charm. We are half in half out of the world while we read. The past and the future assert themselves, and the majestic flow of the verse, measured and sweet, prolongs the cadence till it swells into positive dimensions. The poem is a long poem-it is Tennyson's Poems'-it is the book; and, after all, only two pages of some thirty lines each.

Or, again,Locksley Hall,' what extraordinary capabilities it comprehends! What a passionate grasp of the present, with its vehement love and scorn! What strange, fantastic, brilliant visions of the future! What a picture, for instance, what 'a fairy tale of science,' is his vision, when the air shall be a highway, filled with argosies of magic sails, and the clouds our battle-field, from whence the airy navies' shall rain a ghastly sanguine dew upon the earth; when the nations-Titans once more-shall see their standards plunging through the thunderstorms! What a vivid, eloquent record of youth on the verge of its career-an unquestionable experience-is the boy's first sight

of London!

'Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,
When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life
Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,
Eager-heart as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,

And at night along the dusky highway, near and nearer drawn,
Sees in heaven the light of London flaming like a dreary dawn,
And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then
Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men.'
Locksley Hall.

Take, again, as a further contrast, 'The Day-dream,' that marvel of word-painting, glittering with effects; the gem of fairy tales, the vision of our infancy adapted to our manhood, which ascends me into the brain' like Falstaff's sherris as we read, and exhilarates with a harmless inebriation. The light easy brilliancy with which the poet pictures forth his new world, imparts a sense of kindred power-we share for the moment that command over space and time which belongs to his charmed region. Without making his allegory too prominent even to his own mind, we can scarcely doubt that this is another fairy tale of science,' the details of which we need not too closely pursue. Reader and author are equally absorbed by the story. Every picture is a sort of quintessence. Never was repose more profound, or movement more stirring. There is sparkle in every thought or motion of the Prince, who thinks in flashes, and speeds on his way like a meteor-he comes the Discoverer, trusting to light on something fair'

Undeterred by the bodies and the bones' of those who had trod this path before

And having found Nature's choicest secret, henceforth she is his willing thrall in that world of which he is the moving spirit and the master:

'Beyond the night, across the day,

Through all the world she followed him.'

Nor is the poet's imagination less at home in the reaction from energy to languor and indolence, which all activities must prove; the delineation of which is an unfailing feature of the epic. Armida's garden is not such a dream of utter cowardly relaxation as the land of Lotos-eaters,' in which it seemed always afternoon,' where Turner's most gorgeous sunsets of golden haze are reproduced in words as glowing as his pencila scene and an atmosphere where it is so natural for weak and worn human nature to cry—

'Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

Is there confusion in the little isle?
Let what is broken so remain ;

The gods are hard to reconcile :

"Tis hard to settle order once again.

There is confusion worse than death,

Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,

Long labour unto aged breath,

*

Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars,

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot stars.'

The Lotos-Eaters.

For mere music and the very perfection of rhythmical cadence, what a chrysolite of song is the Farewell,' Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea!' And what tales and idylls of sweet human

interest might be interspersed as episodes and contrasts to the main severer history! What can the poet want for a great work, an epic, that shall build his own fame and illustrate his age? In the first place, he has wanted the wish in any serious degree. A great many people have had the wish who have no other qualification; but to the real poet the task must loom in all its gigantic dimensions, an herculean labour, demanding the concentration of all his thoughts, feelings, tastes, and faculties, —which have been wont to disport themselves at their willupon one great argument, which can hardly be submitted to without some great moral purpose, such as is hardly discernible in Mr. Tennyson. Of course no thinking man can help moralizing on what he sees, and Mr. Tennyson's poems have very decided opinions and tendencies; but his apparent aim in writing is more to give expression to the thought and mood of the time than to illustrate any leading view or principle. Like the bee, his honey is flavoured by the clover, the thyme, or the vineyards through which he has flown; and his flights are desultory. The most various themes furnish him with felicitous occasions for a song. He has succeeded in every vein: but to tie down his genius to Time and Place for a long given period is apparently beyond his powers. His longest continuous poem The Princess-and a very charming and original one it is-avoids the difficulty by ignoring both. There, all manners, all forms of life are blended into one. It is a 'Medley.' We live in fancy as if there were no time, and think how amusing existence would be freed from the difficulties of every age, and enjoying the pleasures and facilities of them all. There are passages of The Princess' of which we never weary. It has inimitable descriptions, original scenes, varieties of character, a play of gentle humour peculiar to the author, touches of the tenderest pathos, and a Song, and an Idyll, which as we read we match against the world. But whatever this might imply, it left on the reader the conviction that its author would never achieve what is technically called a great work. Was the book too entertaining? was it not solid enough? too easy reading? or did we perceive that the medley' form, with all its immunities, was chosen because the poet felt his own want of power to maintain even for that space consistency of plot and action?

6

Maud,' though professing to observe this consistency, fails in the desired solidity from other causes. The author's sympathies are with a mind the reverse of the heroic, a mere passive recipient of impressions; moulded by an early horror, and saddened youth, into a morbid temper precluding deliberate action. We are led through all the experiences of this weakly

sensitive hero with an almost remorseless adherence to truth, the verse blindly following each phase of feeling. While spleen and misanthropy rule, he is prosaic, harsh, clashing, and discordantly vehement; a wounded thing with a rancorous cry.' The utterance is honey sweet when love infuses gentleness and hope; it does not shrink from a touch of maudlin sentimentalism where this is in keeping with the lyrist's passive unbraced condition of mind. His is the exaggeration of the poetical temperament, with sensibilities so acute as to nullify reason and conscience, driven at last by the stream of events to fatuity, but always able to describe in apt words his own sensations; whether railing at the world, as our newspaper scandal pictures it; or steeped in love and feeling, all nature at one with him; or musing in vacant, absent mood over the wonders of a shell; or haunted by a ghost; or muttering in frenzied restlessness of the tortures of his shallow grave. Whether we regard Maud' on its cynical or amatory side; whether as a love poem of the luxuriant oriental type, or a rough matter-of-fact satire on modern life, it is an extravaganzaan effervescence characteristic of the poet's changeful fancy, to which his muse is always subservient, of which he himself says

and argues, we think, an absence of any definite constraining purpose on the poet's mind, which is content to give life and expression to different phases of thought, as external circumstance calls them forth, without any grand ulterior design. But this splenetic humour with his own day may have cast him by a certain revulsion of feeling on the age of mere romance, where fancy has had all its own way, and imaged an impossible world to its liking, in which virtue and vice equally contribute to the picturesque.

It has, we have assumed, been a mistake, though a very general one, to suggest King Arthur, alive or dead, mythical or actual, as a subject for a poem of magnitude or seeming aim. A mass of utterly baseless, and often contradictory legend, which nobody ever believed, can afford no foundation for so solid a superstructure; and any attempt to give historic truth to a scene laid in such remote barbarous antiquity, must make matters worse, and reduce it to harsh, dry, probably revolting antiquarianism. The truth is, even in the legends themselves Arthur is only an allegorical personage-a personified code of the laws and morals of chivalry, with only now and then a touch of vitality. To enter into them intelligently we must bear

this in mind, carefully eschew their professed date, and feel ourselves in-perhaps especially French-feudal times of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, accepting Sir Tristram and Sir Lancelot as exponents of the heroism and the manners of that period, while achieving their adventures in a world of pure fable. For a little while this is an atmosphere very congenial to our poet: his fancy can realize and amplify the series of pictures they present, and there is a charm in applying the key of modern speculation to these enigmas, and reconciling them to our ideas. The subject, we know, must have been long lying in his mind, or it would be easy to believe that these Idylls have been suggested by a recent reperusal of Sir Thomas Malory's Historie of King Arthur.' But a reprint of that work enables the world to judge of Tennyson's degree of success in picturing forth an age in so many points diametrically opposed to the spirit of our own, and whose attraction to him has been this opposition.

With great masters of language we can never tell how far their adaptation of words to thoughts is deliberate. We cannot tell how far the pure Saxon idiom of the Idylls is the effect of intention, or whether the Latin share in our vernacular naturally kept out of his way, as feeling itself out of place in such a theme; but there can be no doubt of the effect of its exclusion in throwing us back into antiquity, and withdrawing us from modern associations. The wonderful truth and susceptibility of the poet's ear have caught the cadence of four centuries ago, and the people talk naturally, yet not as we talk. The first tale, Enid, is not to be found (we believe) in Sir Thomas Malory, but the peculiarity of style is undoubtedly acquired from him, both in its roughnesses and its rhythm, though with a music superadded which stamps the true authorship on every graceful line. Sometimes we can hardly doubt direct imitation in a sort of wilful crabbedness; but on this point we will not touch now. It is perhaps illustrative of the history of the author's mind, that out of the infinite variety of topic and treatment in these legends, he should have been attracted in his earlier years by the mystery and seeming deep significance of the higher themes; the Morte d'Arthur,' sung by him in such fine reverberating tones; the restoration of Excalibur to the enchanted keeping of the Arm

'Clothed in white Samite, mystic, wonderful,'

which rose to receive it ere it fell into the lake; and the king's prophetic utterances while receding into the dreamland, and paradise of death, rowed by other hands than Charon's