and in another direction. The poet takes his course, too, with equal effect towards carrying out his design, and without violating, so far as we see, the essential contemporary truth of his story; while he is thus enabled to exhibit some of the eternal elements of tragedy still in operation among us.

We need say nothing of the skill and beauty with which the remorse of the murderer is painted. The wonderful power of the strains in which the successive stages of this feeling are represented, is admitted on all hands. English literature has nothing more dramatically expressive of a mind on the verge of overthrow, than the verses in which the shell on the Brittany coast serves as text; nothing that presents the incipient stage of madness, springing from the wrecked affections, with more of reality and pathos than the poem, 'Oh! that 'twere possible,' now recovered from the pages of a longforgotten miscellany, and set as a jewel amid jewels; nothing that surpasses in truth and terrible force the madhouse soliloquy, 'Dead, long dead!' If the poem had ended there, 'the strangest anti-climax that we ever remember to have read' would not have offended a recent critic. We fear that in that case, true enough to nature as it might have been, the climax would have come in for blame

of the opposite character, and the poet have been found fault with for leaving his readers to dwell upon horrible impressions without relief. We are sure that no poet deserving the name would choose such an ending where any other was possible. But men do recover from madness, and can-though with an awe-struck sense of their own unfitness for life, a nervous apprehension that paralyzes energy and action,—be raised to interest themselves in something out of themselves and their miseries. And Mr. Tennyson, who introduces his hero breathing scorn and indignation on the meanness and littleness of a society, where the vices of individuals are not obscured and compensated by any conscious noble aim of the commonwealth, dismisses him, cheered and strengthened by knowing that the British nation has risen for a time to a consciousness of a great purpose,-has awaked out of its commercial epicureanism, and roused itself to fight a battle for the right and the good. In sympathy with a grand purpose and a high resolve animating his countrymen, the dreary phantom that had haunted him departs; he knows that his love has forgiven him the injury that his passionate heart caused her; and he can wait, calm and hopeful, till death reunites them.

The fact is, that Mr. Tennyson, without abandoning his lyric forms, has in Maud written a tragedy a work, that is, which demands to be judged, not by the intrinsic goodness and beauty of the actions and emotions depicted, but by their relation to character; that character, again, being not only an interesting study in itself and moving our sympathy, but being related dynamically to the society of the time which serves as the background of the picture, and thus displaying the characteristics of the society by showing its influence, under particular circumstances, upon the character selected. Mr. Tennyson's critics have for the most part read the poem as if its purpose were to hold up an example for our imitation, and have condemned it because, viewed in this light, it offers nothing but a nature of over-excitable sensibilities, first rendered moody by misfortune, then driven mad by its own crime, and finally recovered to a weak exultation in a noble enterprise it has not the manliness to share. But no one feels that Shakspeare is immoral in making Othello kill himself; no one attributes the cynicism of Mephistopheles to Goethe.

Why then should the author of The Gardener's Daughter be set down as morbid ?—the author of Locksley Hall as one who sees no worth in action?—

the author of Dora as a selfish dreamer, who knows nothing of duty? Let us try and be as just to the great men that live amongst us, as to those who are beyond our praise or blame. Let us not stone our own prophets, while we build the tombs of the men who prophesied to our forefathers.

It is a step back in respect of date to speak of The Princess after Maud; but while the latter is the deepest and most tragical exhibition of the action of love upon the character and destiny of an individual that Mr. Tennyson has given to the world, the former treats the sexual relations in their most comprehensive form, and may so be considered as containing implicitly all individual love-poems, as the poetical statement of the law which they all exhibit in particular instances. In its philosophical aim, therefore, The Princess belongs to the same class of poems as The Palace of Art and The Vision of Sin, in both of which a law of life is presented, not as modified by the peculiar nature and circumstances of an individual, but in its absolute universality as a law for the human race. It is natural enough that in an age when absolute and universal solutions are sought not only for physical phenomena, but also for mental and social,-when not only the movements of the heavenly bodies and the complex

relations of the constituent elements of organic matter, but the course of thought-the growth, decay, and character of states,-in a word, the whole life of the individual, and the collective life of humanity, are supposed to be traceable to the orderly operation of fixed principles,—it is natural that, fascinated by the grandeur of speculations of this immensity, the poet, too, should attempt to rise above the portraiture of individual life to the exhibition, in an absolute form, of the principles that determine individual life. Always, indeed, it has been held that the highest poetry gave the law as well as the special instance; interpreted humanity as well as some individual life; and became highest by blending, as they say, the universal with the particular. This, however, simply means that true portraiture of individual life necessarily involves generic and specific, as well as individual truth; that John or Mary must be man and woman-English man and English woman—to be a pair of real human beings, under the influence of any particular feelings. Such poems as those mentioned above drop the individual and the special altogether, and attempt to present a law of human nature in operation upon beings who are human without being particular men or women. Now, it is the very essence of poetry to present, not abstract