Sent for his shield: full meekly rose the maid,
Stript off the case, and gave the naked shield;
Then, when she heard his horse upon the stones,
Unclasping flung the casement back, and look'd
Down on his helm, from which her sleeve had gone.
And Lancelot knew the little clinking sound;
And she by tact of love was well aware

That Lancelot knew that she was looking at him.
And yet he glanced not up, nor waved his hand,
Nor bade farewell, but sadly rode away.

This was the one discourtesy that he used.'

We are always struck with the poet's quick imagination in conjuring up appropriate sound. There is much of this in The Princess. There he realizes the stillness of a girls' college; and when men were first introduced

To them the doors gave way

Groaning, and on the vestal entry shrieked
The virgin marble under iron heel.'

Here the little clinking sound' of the lattice plants us at once in the castle court, and gives a sort of stereoscopic reality as he hits off the effect upon the ear of the rude workmanship of the period. But the merit of this Idyll in particular is its reality. The nearness with which we are brought to fabulous times is a new sensation. The poet lives in the scene he draws. It is not fancy, it is sight; and this vividness is due to the terseness of the wording. We are not allowed to forget ourselves in poetical fancies, where a few simple words can tell a plain tale.

But we pass on to the concluding story, embracing Guinevere's repentance. Of course the chronicler took care that she should repent. She retires to a convent, takes the veil, becomes abbess, and dies in the odour of sanctity; and Sir Lancelot's course is nearly the same. The great feature in Mr. Tennyson's version is the fine part he gives the king, in which it must be observed he follows (and, according to all precedent, has a perfect right to do so) his own ideal. The old writers represent Arthur, when the éclaircissement comes, as viewing the affair solely in its political aspect: all the man with them merges in the leader and legislator. He regards the loss of Sir Lancelot as a premier might his most influential adherent.

"Ah, Jesu, mercy!" said the king; "he is a marvellous knight of prowesse. Alas! me sore repenteth that ever Sir Launcelot should bee against mee; now I am sure that the noble fellowship of the round table is broken for ever, for with him will hold many a noble knight; and now it is befallen so," said King Arthur, "that I may not with my worship but that the queen must suffer death Much more am I sorrier

*

*

for my good knight's losse then for the losse of my queene, for queenes might I have enough, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company."-Sir Thos. Malory, vol. iii. p. 287.

As the founder of chivalry, he is too absorbed in the idea to have a personality and interests of his own. But in the more noble rendering of the story his sense of wrong invests him with humanity. False and totally unreal as his position has hitherto been, tarnished by a wife's dishonour, when the end comes, and the extinction of his dream, he rises to the majesty which has failed him hitherto. The blending of the mythical with the actual is a masterpiece of the poet's art. In the hushed mysterious scene, half sight half sound, which we witness through the fallen Guinevere's sensations; with her shrinking ears and abject despair; his words do not lose their nature, while they are yet the voice of doom.

She sits in her convent cell, wrapped in a doubtful contrition,

when

'There rode an armed warrior to the doors.
A murmuring whisper thro' the nunnery ran,
Then on a sudden a cry, "The King." She sat
Stiff-stricken, listening; but when armed feet
Thro' the long gallery from the outer doors
Rang coming, prone from off her seat she fell,
And grovell'd with her face against the floor:
There with her milkwhite arms and shadowy hair
She made her face a darkness from the King:
And in the darkness heard his armed feet
Pause by her; then came silence, then a voice,
Monotonous and hollow like a Ghost's

Denouncing judgment, but tho' changed the King's.

"Liest thou here so low, the child of one
I honour'd, happy, dead before thy shame?
Well is it that no child is born of thee.
The children born of thee are swrod and fire,
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws,

The craft of kindred and the Godless hosts

Of heathen swarming o'er the Northern Sea."'

On her, in solemn and magnificent language he lays the burden of fallen hopes, and of all the evil that is to come, and bids a stern yet tender farewell, while she neither looks nor speaks-prostrate in unutterable shame. The king's departure, our last sight of him, is in keeping with all the mystery and sentiment which for so many ages has hung round his name.

'Then, listening till those armed steps were gone,
Rose the pale Queen, and in her anguish found
The casement: "Peradventure," so she thought,
"If I might see his face, and not be seen."
And lo, he sat on horseback at the door!

And near him the sad nuns with each a light
Stood, and he gave them charge about the Queen,
To guard and foster her for evermore.

And while he spake to these, his helm was lower'd,
To which for crest the golden dragon clung
Of Britain; so she did not see the face,
Which then was as an angel's, but she saw,
Wet with the mists and smitten by the lights
The Dragon of the great Pendragonship
Blaze, making all the night a steam of fire.
And even then he turn'd; and more and more
The moony vapour rolling round the King,
Who seem'd the phantom of a Giant in it,
Enwound him fold by fold, and made him gray
And grayer, till himself became as mist

Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom.'

This closing Idyll has passages of pure poetic fancy in a more playful vein. The little novice's catalogue of omens and fairy appearances which welcomed in King Arthur and the fair reign of chivalry is admirable for its life, and also for its keeping and fitness to the period. This harmony and fitness is one of the poet's most constant merits, and is to the fancy what tact is to the manner. The imagination is kept subordinate to the range and circumstances of the scene. His similes are constantly those that would suggest themselves to the bystander, whether taken from natural or artificial objects; that is, they accord with the habits of thought of the time. Thus Enid and Geraint, in their sullen estrangement

The two remain'd

Apart by all the chamber's width, and mute
As creatures voiceless thro' the fault of birth,
Or two wild men supporters of a shield,
Painted, who stare at open space, nor glance
The one at other, parted by the shield.'

And when the surly knight kills the three bandits, he

'Dismounting like a man

That skins the wild beast after slaying him,

Stript from the three dead wolves of woman born

The three gay suits of armour.'

And Enid, on finding herself helpless in Earl Doorm's hands,

'Sent forth a sudden sharp and bitter cry,

As of a wild thing taken in the trap,

Which sees the trapper coming thro' the wood.'

The ruder mechanism of the time is never forgotten: when her old lover furtively scans and approaches her

"Then rose Limours, and looking at his feet,
Like him who tries the bridge he fears may fail,
Crost and came near.'

When Guinevere's conscience disturbs her

A vague spiritual fear

Like to some doubtful noise of creaking doors,
Heard by the watcher in a haunted house,

That keeps the rust of murder on the walls—
Held her awake.'

The way in which metaphor suggests itself widely differs in different minds. With one it is a search: there is the impulse, the need, as it were, of illustration, to give force to the idea ; and in this case the similes are lofty, ambitious, Miltonic, drawn from a wide range. The poet's eye wanders from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. With another, images and likenesses steal into the thoughts unawares; the mind broods in congenial scenes, and every object brought before it in this mood associates itself with the reason and fancy, ready to spring into conscious being, simultaneously with thought. As a rule, Mr. Tennyson's metaphor is of this order; not that all poets do not vary their moods, and exchange temperaments for a time; but this seems the most natural to him. In The Princess,' where he assumes the 'mock-heroic gigantesque' style, the similes are very finely in this vein; and here tact is a second nature, suggesting a rush of prodigious imagery; and likening the cold, awful princess to all big-sounding, remote, unfamiliar things. Her voice in grief and scorn,

'Like a bell

Toll'd by an earthquake in a trembling tower
Rung ruin.'

When she draws up to her proud height she grew
'Tall as a figure lengthened on the sand
When the tide ebbs in sunshine.'

When her imperial will is thwarted, she is

'A river level with the dam,

Ready to burst and flood the world with foam ;'

and then stands looking out into the night:

'Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves
Of tempest, when the crimson-rolling eye
Glares ruin, and the wild birds on the light
Dash themselves dead.'

When he would express her fixed purpose she stands

'Like a stately pine

Set in a cataract on an island-crag,

When storm is on the heights, and right and left
Suck'd from the dark heart of the long hills, roll
The torrents, dash'd to the vale.'

These are specimens of search. Nature is ransacked to find parallels to such mighty emotions; but similes that suggest themselves are of a different class; that come unasked when the poet is enjoying that nothing-to-do leisure which is so essential a part of his business: when sauntering and dreaming by shore or sounding waves or brook or pool, in wood and meadow and farm and garden, his whole being is open to impressions, and he allows the influences of the hour, whatever they may be, an undisputed sway. It is strange the little. effects which will fix themselves permanently on the memory in this mood when men reason and moralize without knowing it; as where resentment for a small injury

'Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart,

As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long
A little bitter pool about a stone

On the bare coast.'

In the whole series of poems the action of water, whether in wave or foam or cataract or running stream or mantling pool, is dwelt upon with a persistence that might seem monotonous, but that every picture is of some separate effect, and the result of close and long observation. And the life that haunts these scenes, and every scene where the mind can expatiate undisturbed, is as minutely apprehended. The dragon-fly, the gnat, the butterfly, the earth-worm, the caterpillar, are seen at their work. 'The tender things that being caught feign death;'

the flight of

the

เ

A troop of snowy doves athwart the dusk,

When some one batters at the dove-cote doors;

Three horses that have broken fence,

And glutted all night long breast-deep in corn;'

the same animal that hears the corn-bin open and pricks up his ears; the swallows out of time who wonder why they come;' the parrot that turns

'Up thro' gilt wires a crafty, loving eye,

And takes a lady's finger with all care,

And bites it for true love, and not for harm ;'

the crumpled poppy from the sheaf,'-all furnish fresh and wonderfully apt illustration; apt in a sense that the unfamiliar metaphor can never be. The same musing mood finds happy similitudes in the mere abstract processes of the intellect. In Memoriam' is full of this. This, for instance, is a confusion familiar to us all :