ful melody. But had we minds full of the idea and the strength requisite for such work, they would find in this huge, harassed, and luxurious national existence the nourishment, not the poison, of creative art. The death-struggle of commercial and political rivalry, the brooding doubt and remorse, the gas-jet flame of faith irradiating its own coal-mine darkness-in a word, our overwrought materialism fevered by its own excess into spiritual dreams—all this might serve the purposes of a bold imagination, no less than the creed of the antipoetic Puritans became poetry in the mind of Milton, and all bigotries, superstitions, and gore-dyed horrors were flames that kindled steady light in Shakspeare's humane and meditative song. all the essential elements of such perform- | er and riches absorbs the energies that ance. And in spite of the puerile egotisms would otherwise exert themselves in shapeand dawdling prate into which the poem so often wanders, the first five cantos of Don Juan, forming in point of bulk about a half, have more of fiery beauty and native sweetness in them than anything we know of in our modern literature. There is also a wide range and keenness of observation; and were some trivialities struck out, as they so easily might be, no capital defect would remain but the weakness of speculative culture visible in all Lord Byron's philosophical excursions. In the latter half of the poem, and unhappily when he is on English ground, the lax shapelessness of structure, the endless, slipshod, yawny loungings, and vapid carelessness of execution, become very disagreeable in spite of passages rich with imperishable beauty, wit, and vigour, such as no other modern Englishman or man could have approached. On the whole, with all its faults, moral and poetic, the earlier portion of this singular book will probably remain, like the first half of Faust, the most genuine and strik-ployed so many diverse elements of circuming monument of a whole recent national literature. But the weakness as to all recent thought, and the incomplete groundplan, place it somewhat lower than cou'd be wished. And at best it is but one book, in an age that produces annual thousands. Little therefore as is all that has been done towards the poetic representation of our time-even in the looser and readier form of prose romance-it is hard to suppose that it is incapable of such treatment. The still unadulterated purity of home among large circles of the nation presents an endless abundance of the feelings and characters, the want of which nothing else in existence can supply even to a poet. And these soft and steady lights strike an observer all the more from the restless activity and freedom of social ambition, the shifting changes of station, and the wealth gathered on one hand and spent on the other with an intenseness and amplitude of will to which there is at least nothing now comparable among mankind. The power of self-subjection combined with almost boundless liberty, indeed necessitated by it, and the habit of self-denial with wealth beyond all calculation-these are indubitable facts in modern England. But while recognized as facts, how far do they still remain from that development as thoughts which philosophy desires, or that vividness as images which is the aim of poetry! It is easy to say that the severity of conscience in the best minds checks all play of fancy, and the fierceness of the outward struggle for pow. Of all our recent writers the one who might seem at first sight to have most nearly succeeded in this quest after the poetic Sangreal is Crabbe. No one has ranged so widely through all classes, em stance and character. But nowhere, or very, very rarely, do we find in him that eager sweetness, a fiery spirituous essence, yet bland as honey, wanting which all poetry is but an attempt more or less laudable, and after all, a failure. Shooting arrows at the moon, one man's bow shoots higher than another's; but the shafts of all alike fall back to earth, and bring us no light upon their points. It needs a strange supernatural power to achieve the impossible, and fix the silver shaft within the orb that shoots in turn its rays of silver back into our human bosoms. Crabbe is always an instructive and forceful, almost always even an interesting writer. His works have an imperishable value as records of his time; and it even may be said that few parts of them but would have found an appropriate place in some of the reports of our various commissions for inquiring into the state of the country. Observation, prudence, acuteness, uprightness, self-balancing vigour of mind are everywhere seen, and are exerted on the whole wide field of common life. All that is wanting is the enthusiastic sympathy, the jubilant love, whose utterance is melody, and without which all art is little better than a laborious ploughing of the sand, and then sowing the sand itself for seed along the fruitless furrow. In poetry we seek, and find, a refuge from the hardness and narrowness of the actual world. But using the very substance of this Actual for poetry, its positiveness, shrewdness, detailedness, incongruity, and labourers. If he has not given us back our adding no peculiar power from within, we age as a whole transmuted into crystalline do no otherwise than if we should take clearness and lustre, a work accomplished shelter from rain under the end of a roof- only by a few of the greatest minds under spout. the happiest circumstances for their art, yet To Mr. Wordsworth of course these we scarce know to whom we should be remarks on Crabbe would be by no means equally grateful as to him who has enriched applicable. Yet even he has exhibited us with any shapes of lasting loveliness only one limited, however lofty region of won from the vague and formless infinite.' life, and has made it far less his aim to Mr. Tennyson has done more of this kind represent what lies around him by means than almost any one that has appeared of self-transference into all its feelings, than among us during the last twenty years. to choose therefrom what suits his spirit of And in such a task of alchemy a really ethical meditation, and so compel man- successful experiment, even on a small kind, out alike of their toilsome daily paths scale, is of great worth compared with the and pleasant nightly dreams, into his own thousands of fruitless efforts or pretences severe and stately school of thought. The on the largest plan, which are daily present movements of human life, nay its clamouring for all men's admiration of varied and spontaneous joys, to him are their nothingness. little, save so far as they afford a text for a The first of these two volumes consists mind in which fixed will, and stern specu- of republished poems, and may be regarded, lation, and a heart austere and measured we presume, as all that Mr. Tennyson even in its pity, are far more obvious wishes to preserve of his former editions. powers than fancy, emotion, or keen and He has sifted in most cases his earlier versatile sympathy. He discourses indeed harvests, and kept the better grain. There with divine wisdom of life and nature, and are some additions of verses and stanzas all their sweet and various impulses; but here and there, many minute changes, and the impression of his own great calm ju- also beneficial shortenings and condensadicial soul is always far too mighty for any tions. The second volume, however, is all-powerful feeling of the objects he pre- on the whole far advanced in merit beyond sents to us. In his latest volume there is a the first. There is more clearness, solidity, poem with the date of 1803, At the Grave and certainty of mind visible in it throughof Burns, full of reflective tenderness. But out: especially some of the blank-verse it is noticeable that even here Burns is in- poems-a style almost unattempted in the teresting, not for his own sake, and in his earlier series have a quiet completeness own splendid personality, but with refer- and depth, a sweetness arising from the ence to Mr. Wordsworth's mind and the happy balance of thought, feeling, and exeffect of the peasant's poetry on him. We pression, that ranks them among the riches are glad indeed to have any pretext for of our recent literature. citing this beautiful stanza (p. 53) :— -- 'Well might I mourn that he was gone How verse may build a princely throne The collection includes poems of four markedly different kinds :-1. The Idyllic, in which there is sometimes an epic calmness in representing some event or situation of private life, sometimes a flow of lyrical feeling, but still expanding itself in a narrative or description of the persons, events, and objects that fill the poet's imagination. 2. The purely Lyrical-odes, songs, and In thus pointing to the problem which the more rapid ballads, where the emotion poetry now holds out, and maintaining that is not only uppermost, but all in all, and it has been but partially solved by our most the occasions and interests involved appear illustrious writers, there is no design of but casually and in hints. 3. Fancy pieces: setting up an unattainable standard, and those, namely, of which the theme is borthen blaming any one in particular for rowed or imitated from those conceptions inevitably falling short of it. Out of an age of past ages that have now become exso diversified and as yet so unshapely, he tremely strange or quite incredible for us. who draws forth any graceful and expressive In these the principal charm of the work forms is well entitled to high praise. Turn- can spring only from the vividness and ing into fixed beauty any part of the shifting grace of the imagery, the main idea making and mingled matter of our time, he does no direct impression on our feelings. 4. what in itself is very difficult, and affords There is a class of Allegories, Moralities, very valuable help to all his future fellow- didactic poems. We might add another, of Facetiæ; but in these the writer, though not unmeaning or without talent, seems far inferior to himself, and they happily fill but a small part of his pages. The first and third of these classes-the Idylls and Fancies-are, in our view, of the greatest merit, and differ in little but the stranger and more legendary themes of the latter series, while they resemble each other in a somewhat spacious and detailed style of description, with, however, an evident general predominance of personal feeling, sometimes masked by the substitution of an imaginary narrator for the real poet. His bowstring slacken'd, languid Love, Of the poem be said. 'To -,' much need not ludicrously flat beginning of a serious poem Clear-headed friend' is the most that we have ever seen proceed from a real poet; and the construction of the final attempted to disentangle it into any meanstrophe is so obscure that we have in vain ing. Yet few readers can be required to spend as much time on such a matter as we are both bound and glad so to employ. In We shall speak first of the second class, the same verses 'kingly intellect' is at least which we have called Odes. Claribel,' in that connection a phrase of vague rheto'Lilian,' 'Isabel,' 'Madeline,' 'Adeline,' ric. The two little poems to the Owl' are Eleanore,' and 'Margaret,'-all are rap- at best ingenious imitations of the manner tures in honour of ladies. 'Isabel' is similar of some of Shakspeare's and his contemin style and plan to the rest, but differs by poraries' songs; well done enough, but not being addressed to a matron, not a maiden; worth doing. and though, like the others, eupnuistic The Recollections of the Arabian Nights' enough, and coldly ingenious, is pleasant is of a better kind. The writer does not as a relief from the unrealities of rhetorical in this seem painfully striving after topics, sentiment. There is a beautiful idea in it images, variations, and originalities, but with much verbal melody and many writing from lively conception of a theme dainty phrases, far beyond the reach of any which offered in abundance the material but a man of genius, however inaptly genius suited to his fancy and ear. The poem is may be spent in dressing make-believe emotions with far-fetched rhythmic ornament. Claribel' is a sort of lament over a dead woman. The other young ladies seem to have the advantage of being still little progress in imagery, and none in alive, but their poetic environment is not thought, beyond the first stanza, in all the for that the less ghostly and preternatural. following thirteen; and that some meaning In all of these pieces the will to write adapted to our modern European brains poetry seems to us to have supplied might perhaps have been insinuated under (insufficiently) the place of poetic feeling; those gorgeous eastern emblems without though one sees that only a poet could injury to their genuine Asiatic import. have written them. The heroines are The gold and red arabesque repeats itself, square after square of the pattern, with undeniable splendour, but somewhat wearying monotony. moonshine maidens, in the number of whom Mr. Tennyson is really as unconscionable as Solomon or Mahomet. It may be suspected that neither the Arab prophet nor Jewish king would much have approved such questionable charms as black-beaded eyes and crimson-threaded lips. We of a more metaphysical generation grow heartily weary of the delicacies, and subtleties, and super-fineries of SO many mysterious passions, and phantom objects, as carefully discriminated as varieties of insects by Ehrenberg, or fossils by Owen. The whole style smells of musk, and is not without glimpses of rouge and pearlpowder. We have found nothing here at once more distinct and graceful than the following lines, and these are marred by the two final epithets: at once brilliant and pleasing: but we may remark that its merit is of a kind which presents itself somewhat too easily to a reader of the tales it recalls; that there is The Ode to Memory' aims at a far higher sort of excellence. Had it preceded, instead of following, Mr. Wordsworth's 'Platonic Ode,' it would have been a mem orable poem. The elder poet's solemn rapture on the 'Recollections of Childhood' funeral vase, were that lighted, as it ought is comparable, in its way, to the Portland to be, from within: on a purple ground, dark as midnight, still and graceful snowwhite figures, admitting of endless interpretations, all more or less fitting, but none, perhaps, conclusive. Mr. Tennyson has caught some of the same feeling, and much of the rhythm, but has not even earned what was still within his power, the praise of a greater variety and richness of painting, - nor has precipitated with Shelleyan passion | seems oddly misnamed. It is full of true the stream that slept so calmly in Mr. and vehement, yet musical passion; and it Wordsworth's mountain-lake. suggests the strong flow of Lesbian poetry, There could hardly be a more decisive and particularly the well-known fragment proof of Mr. Tennyson's inaptitude for Or- of Sappho addressed to a woman. Whence, phic song than the last six lines of this then, the name? Lesbos has hardly gained poem :by becoming a part of Turkey, or Sappho by turning into Fatima. But the poem is beautiful: we scarcely know where in English we could find anything so excellent, as expressing the deep-hearted fulness of a woman's conscious love. Many will read it as if it belonged only to some Fatima or Sappho to feel with this entireness of abandonment. But there are hundreds of women in the West end of London-and in the East end too-who would find it only a strain that nature had already taught • My friend, with thee to live alone, Thou dewy dawn of memory.' To tell Memory, the mystic prophetess to whom in these transcendant initiations we owe all notices connecting our small individuality with the Infinite Eternal, that converse with her were better than crowns and sceptres! Memory might perhaps reply- My friend, if you have not, after encircling the universe, traversing the abyss of ages, and uttering more than a hundred lines, forgotten that there are such toys on that earth as crowns and poor sceptres, it were better for you to be alone, not with, but without me.' Think how sublime a doctrine, that to have the beatific vision is really better than the power and pomp of the world. Philosophy, that sounds all depths, has seldom approached a deeper bathos. Of the little poem called Circumstance' we shall quote the whole, pleased to find something that we can produce in support of our admiration for a large class of Mr. Tennyson's poems, on which we have not yet touched: Two children in two neighbouring villages Wash'd with still rains, and daisy-blossomed ; Much is not attempted here, but the more performed. How simple is the language; how quietly flowing the rhythm; how clear the images; and with what pleasant enigmatic openness do the few lines set before us all the little tale of the two villagers, playing, parted, meeting, loving, wedding, dying, and leaving behind them two orphan children! It is a small tone of natural feeling, caught and preserved with genuine art, and coming home to every bosom that sweet words can penetrate at all. Fatima' is of a far higher pitch, but them. In one less careful of his melody-and we have few very recent writers so successfully careful of it-we should hardly make any remark on the harsh r's in these latter lines, so unsuitable to the vague and gliding fluency of the image. Under the head of FANCIES we class all those poems relating to distant and marvellous circumstances and persons such as we can only conceive, and that very imperfectly, by a conscious removal of our thoughts into regions of which we have no experience, and which seem to us half impossible. In some instances the poet only attempts to reproduce outward relations of society and a kind of feeling which have departed from our common life-as in 'The Sisters,' The Beggar Maid,' 'St. Simeon,' and 'St. in those of brazen statuary on tombs, brilliant as stained glass, musical as the organ-tones of chapels. And as some of these romantic songs remind us of Paul Cagliari, others— those especially that have been dreamt upon the lap of the Greek Muse-are akin to the creations of a still greater painter than the Veronese, Correggio. So mild and mournful in interest are these, so perfect in harmony of images and rhythm, we almost grieve at last to waken from our trance and find we have been deluded by a Pagan vision, and by the echoes of oracles now dumb. Scarcely fabled magic could be more successful. The effect is the result evidently of great labour, but also of admirable art. As minstrel conjurations, perhaps, in English, Kubla Khan' alone exceeds them. The verse is full of liquid intoxication, and the language of golden oneness. While we read, we too are wandering, led by nymphs, among the thousand isles of old mythology, and the present fades away from us into a pale vapour. To bewitch us with our own daily realities, and not with their unreal opposites, is a still higher task; but it could not be more thoroughly performed. Agnes.' In others, and the greater number of these pieces, he rushes away with us into the ruins and sepulchres of old supernatural beliefs-dear to him, however, not as still partly credible, or as ever having been sacred and awful to mankind, but for the graceful strangeness of the figures that they suggest and are linked with. This mythological poetry is not of equal interest and difficulty with that which produces as brilliant and deep effects from the ordinary realities of our own lives. But it is far from worthless. Some German ballads of this kind by Goëthe and Schiller-nay, by Bürger and by Heine-have great power over every one, from the art with which the imagination is won to accept as true what we still feel to be so strange. This is done mainly by a potent use of the mysterious relation between man and nature, and between all men towards each other, which always must show itself on fitting occasions as the visionary, the ominous, the spectral, theeery,' and awful consciousness of a supernatural somewhat within our own homely flesh. It appears to us that Mr. Tennyson has neither felt so deeply as some other poets-Coleridge, for instance, Christabel '-the moral ground on The Morte d'Arthur,' the first poem in which this oracular introsentient part of the second volume, seems to us less costly man is firmly built, nor has employed its jewel-work, with fewer of the broad flashes phantasmagoric power with such startling of passionate imagery, than some others, witchery. But there is almost always a and not compensating for this inferiority vivid elegance and inward sweetness in his by any stronger human interest. The mielfin song, whether Gothic or Grecian, and raculous legend of 'Excalibar' does not he sometimes even uses the legends of come very near to us, and as reproduced Pagan antiquity with a high perfection of by any modern writer must be a mere indreamy music. genious exercise of fancy. The poem, however, is full of distinct and striking description, perfectly expressed; and a tone of mild, dignified sweetness attracts, though it hardly avails to enchant us. The poet might perhaps have made the loss of the magic sword, the death of Arthur, and dissolution of the Round Table, a symbol for the departure from earth of the whole old Gothic world, with its half-pagan, allpoetic faith, and rude yet mystic blazonries. But it would be tyrannical exaction to require more philosophy in union with so fiery and productive a fancy. No one but Coleridge among us has ever combined a thoroughly speculative intellect with so restless an abundance of beautiful imagery as we find in Mr. Tennyson; and the younger minstrel has as much of the reflection proper to an age like ours as any living poet except Mr. Wordsworth, and as any but a very few deceased ones. 6 The Dying Swan,'' The Merman,' and 'The Mermaid,' are figments which he has not connected with any feeling that could render us willing to believe, nor with any meaning that would give them value as symbols. There is a kind of unhappy materialism in some of these attempts at spiritualizing nature, and in the midst of some beautiful images we are stopped short by fancies equally farsought and unpleasant; see, for instance, vol. i., p. 73. There are, however, hardly any of these legendary poems that might not well be cited as examples of solid and luminous painting. We must admit that Mr. Tennyson has scarcely succeeded, perhaps has not tried, to unite any powerful impression on the feelings with his coloured blaze. It is painted-though well painted-fire. But in animated pomp of imagery, all in movement, like a work of Paolo Veronese, few things that we know could rival these compositions. His figures are distinct as The gift of comprehensive thoughtfulness does not, however, show itself to ad |