So those four abode Within one house together; and as years Went forward, Mary took another mate; But Dora lived unmarried till her death.'-vol. ii., p. 33-41. We shall leave this without comment, which, we trust, is needless. Audley Court,' and' Walking to the Mail,' are in a lighter style, and with less of interest. The Talking Oak' is more important, but does not satisfy us so well. This also, like most of Mr. Tennyson's better poems, is love-inspired and love-breathing. But an ancient oak, that is won by a poet to utter Dodonæan oracles, would hardly, we conceive, be so prolix and minute in its responses. In Locksley Hall' the fancy is again at home. It is, perhaps, on the whole, the one of all these poems in which far-extended thought is best involved in genuine and ardent imagination. A quick and generous heart pours out through the lips of a young man who has been deceived by the woman he loved, and who, inflamed with disappointment, reviews at passionate speed-far unlike the prosaic slowness of professional reviewers-the images that the darkened world now presents to him, and the diverse paths of action that he is tempted to try. We know not what the author means by his hero's talk of comrades and bugle-horns; for all the rest is the direct outbirth and reflection of our own age. The speaker tells his former happiness in the following lines: 'Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young, And I said, "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light, And she turn'd-her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs- Saying, "I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong;" Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands; Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might, Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring, Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships, O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more! Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung, Is it well to wish thee happy?—having known me—to decline On a range of lower feelings, and a narrower heart than mine!'-vol. ii., p. 94-96. The images that haunt him, of the faithless maiden's married life with a despised husband, are full of bitter strength; but we prefer a small specimen of his more indistinct and wider notions : Can I but re-live in sadness? I will turn that earlier page. Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield, And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn, And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then, Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill'd with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm.'-vol. ii., pp. 103, 104. 'Lady Clare' is not memorable; but the Lord of Burleigh' well deserves citation, as an example of the skill with which a poet can find a true and complete imaginative interest in an anecdote of our actual refined life : Ancient homes of lord and lady, Built for pleasure and for state. All he shows her makes him dearer: On that cottage growing nearer, He shall have a cheerful home; Thus her heart rejoices greatly, And beneath the gate she turns; Than all those she saw before : Bows before him at the door. Here he lives in state and bounty, All at once the colour flushes Her sweet face from brow to chin: As it were with shame she blushes, And her spirit changed within. Then her countenance all over Pale again as death did prove; But he clasp'd her like a lover, And he cheer'd her soul with love. So she strove against her weakness; Though at times her spirit sank; And her gentle mind was such And the people loved her much. But a trouble weighed upon her, Unto which she was not born. As she murmur'd, "Oh, that he So she droop'd and droop'd before him, Weeping, weeping late and early, And he looked at her and said, 201-205. Ignorance only, or lunacy, could deny him. a deep internal power of true poetry. But even this, and not merely the manly passions and the soft affections, even the shaping and inspired imagination itself, is always subject to the considerate dominion of the moral idea. Emotion. the most general and obvious, the necessary impulse of all poetry in every age, is restrained in all his writings by the awful presence of selfcentred will. The feelings are described rather than shared; the tragic passions are summoned up only to be rebuked by a more solemn conjuration than their own; the free enjoyment of life and nature approved only within the bounds of unrelaxing caution; and love-the name bubbled by every wave of Hippocrene and thundered in all the floods and storms of the main ocean of our being-is here a grave ritual sound spoken over the still waters drawn from the well of Truth for a penitential baptism. Of course it would be far from our design to charge this great writer with want of feeling. A pot without feeling! Fire without warmth, and a heart without pulsation! But it is clear that his feelings are always strictly watched by his meditative conscience too strictly, not for wisdom, but for rapture. Not a prophet in the wilderness lifting up his testimony against an evil generation, for the he rt of the seer must be red and fierce as molten iron-not a hermit in his cave retired from human joys, for the anchorite floats above his Then her people, softly treading, rocky floor, forgetful of laws and retribuBore to earth her body, drest tions, in an ecstasy of self-denying love, In the dress that she was wed in, that supplies the place of decalogue and That her spirit might have rest.” -vol. ii., pp. duties but like the prophet and the monk, this poet turns aside from the busy ways Every thoughtful reader of the poems of life to speculate, in sage and somewhich we have thus glanced through will times awful rhetoric, on the wondrousness be led to compare them with those on simi- of existence, and the care with which we lar themes, of present human existence in must tend the purity of its fountain in the the country, by the most profoundly reflec-heart. There is no face so lovely, no act tive of our living poets, Mr. Wordsworth. 'Michael,' 'The Brothers,' the story of Margaret in the beginning of 'The Excursion,' Ruth.'-these also are English Idylls, drawn from the well-springs of Nature, and finished with the painful care of a great artist. How naked and bare they all are in their solemn stillness! Nor is it only in these poems, but even in works of lighter and gladder movement, that we are 'compelled to listen to the bard as to a grave teacher of moral truth, whom the spirit of spontaneous enjoyment, and even the sympathy with whatever is pathetic or grand in man, cannot hurry beyond the school of his compassionate but austere stoicism. so gushing over with keen life, that it can kindle at once the minstrel into song, hurrying him beyond all thought of wrong and right, and having warrant enough in the zealous heat which it inspires. Only in communion with the stars, the mountains, and the sea, the flowers of spring and autumn leaves, and all the simple mysteries of natural things, does his heart pour, without pause, a stream of melodious gladness, and fear no danger in its own happy ecstasies. Even in these solemn elevations of soul he does not forget to impose a scheme of toils on human life. Among streams and rocks he begins with discourse of virtue; ard when he has risen on the ladder of his vision to the stars, we still hear him singing and capable of such general application, It is not (he says) the object of these pages to suggest the banishing of sepulchral monuments altogether from our churches, deeply reverencing, as we must, the antiquity of the custom and the feeling of love and respect for the dead, "as the last work of charity we can perform for them," which in many instances prompts their erection; and also believing that they have often been the means of producing a "The salutary impression upon the living. sensations of pious cheerfulness which attend the celebration of Sunday," says Wordsworth, "are profitably chastised by the sight of the graves of kindred and friends, gathered together in that general home, towards which the thoughtful, yet happy, spectators themselves The descendant of a noble are journeying." In the younger of these two idyllic writers, on the whole the most genial poet of English rural life that we know-for Burns was of another language and country, no less than school-there is a very different stamp of soul. In his works there has been art enough required and used to give such clear and graceful roundness; but all skill of labour, all intellectual purpose, kept behind the sweet and fervid impulse of the heart. Thus, all that we call affection, imagination, intellect, melts out as one long happy sigh into union with the visibly beautiful, and with every glowing breath of human life. In all his better poems there is this same character-this fusion of his own fresh feeling with the delightful affections, baffled or blessed, of others and with the fairest images of the real world as it lies before us all to-day. To this same tendency all legend and mystery are subordinate to this the understanding, theorizing and dogmatizing, yet ever ministers, a loyal giant to a fairy mistress. In his better and later works the fantastic and in-house who in his family mausoleum "sees his steel-clad sires and mothers mild" reposing on genious brain, abounding in gold-dust and their marble tombs, and the peasant who saundiamond-powder, and the playmate of ters among the mouldering heaps of the foresphinxes and hieroglyphic beasts, pours out fathers of his hamlet, are alike susceptible of its wealth, and yokes its monsters only for some mournful pleasure, arising from the conthe service of that homely northern nature, templation of" these relics of veneration;" and are alive to the sentiments so exquisitely exwithout whose smile all wealth is for us but dead stones, and all mysteries but pressed by Gray in a stanza which ought never to have been expunged from his Elegy:weary task-like puzzles. "Hark! how the sacred calm that breathes around Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease; In still small accents whispering from the ground A grateful earnest of eternal peace." Tombs of different periods, and of styles characteristic of those periods, (provided they do not offend in point of taste), collected in and around a place of worship, must promote the feeling which some of them at least were intended to excite. The lesson on mortality is most striking, when we see the earthly pomps of age after age, in the outward fashion of each period, all gathered within the same precinct; the dead, great and small, of different generations, waiting alike the Resurrection. ART. V.-Remarks on English Churches, and on the Expediency of rendering Sepulchral Memorials subservient to Pious and Christian Uses. By J. H. Markland, F.R.S. and S.A. Oxford, 1842. 12mo. Second Edition. MR. MARKLAND has long been known for his zealous and indefatigable services to the Church-services not the less valuable as rendered by a layman. And he has now added another to their number, by a suggestion so likely to accord with the present improved state of religious feeling, 6 Still, it must be admitted that commonplace monuments and tablets have been, and continue to be most needlessly multiplied, and that this excess might be wisely restrained. On the walls of many churches, instead of contributing to the their own testamentary directions, or by the mistaken kindness of surviving friends, tombs of a costly and substantial character are prepared for numbers, whose claims to sepulchral honours could not well be classed with those of the hero of Fontenoy. The poet's lament is not to apply to them, and, after a vast expense and waste of talent and labour, the " marble," in the shape of a statue or bust, is polished placed upon its pedestal.'-p. 36, &c. beauty of the fabric, they are unsightly excrescences. Not only has every vacant place been seized upon, but portions of the original structure have been, and are shamefully mutilated to receive them. For example: Mr. Rickman, speaking of the ancient altar-screen at Beverley, "unrivalled in its description of work," states "that some remarkably fine and intricate tracery has been cut away to put in some poor modern monumental tablets."* The beautiful altarscreen in the Lady Chapel of York Minster, and the screens in various other cathedrals and churches, have equally suffered. A long cata-vious :logue of similar enormities might be given, as instances of gross carelessness and depraved taste. In the majority of cases, why is not the simple gravestone allowed to suffice? Perhaps the very individual whose name is to be engraved on a costly monument was so averse to notoriety, that the distinctive excellence of his character consisted in those retiring qualities which never desired to travel out of the domestic circle. "It is my will (the excellent Bishop Sanderson desired) that no costly monument be erected for my memory, but only a fair flat marble stone be laid over me. And I do very much desire my will may be carefully observed herein, hoping it may become exemplary to some one or other; at least, however, testifying at my death-what I have so often earnestly professed in my lifetime-my utter dislike of the vast expenses laid out in funeral solemnities, with very little benefit to any, which, if bestowed in pious and charitable works, might redound to the public or private benefit of many persons." Dr. Wells requested to have no stone set up to his memory;" but he did leave a monument in his parish, for he rebuilt the parsonage at his own cost. Mr. Newman justly observes that "it is always a satisfaction to have evidence that an author is writing under the practical influence of his own principles." Sir Henry Wotton directed his executors to "lay over his grave a marble stone, plain and not costly; considering that time moulders even marble to dust, for monuments themselves must die." Again, how frequently does it happen that on such memorials all that is mentioned is nothing more than what the parish-register could tell us! "Most inscriptions record nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day and died upon another: the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind. I could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them, but that they were born and that they died." Collins, in his exquisite lines on the death of Colonel Ross, gives to that brave soldier a grave covered with turf, and tells us that "Aerial hands shall build his tomb, With shadowy trophies crown'd." But men "of meaner mould, life's common clods," are not to be thus easily satisfied. By A still more lamentable instance may be seen in the exquisite Lady Chapel, or Trinity Church, attached to Ely Cathedral. And the suggestion which follows is ob If, from the comparatively humble station which an individual may have occupied, or from his uneventful life, no useful lesson can be taught by the inscription on his tomb, why should not an expenditure (which in this case must be prompted by somewhat of vanity in his surviving friends) receive another and a higher direction? Might not the cost be made instrumental to a better and a holier end? Might it not be devoted to the service and glory of God, and to the benefit of those who worship in His house? For more than a century, mural monuments with cherubs, skulls, lamps, and twisted columns, with little variety, were permitted to deform our churches. In later days we have had the urn or the sarcophagus-strange ornaments in a Christian temple!-or a female figure, veiled with drapery, sitting under a willow, bending over a tomb, or leaning upon an extinguished torch! These designs have become wearisome and uninteresting from repetition, and unless they proceed from the chisel of a master, cannot but be wholly disregarded. It should be an object, therefore, with us all, where our influence may extend, to endeavour to restrain the passion for erecting sepulchral memorials, in order that they may be confined exclusively to those, who, from their distinguished talents and their useful lives, merit posthumous honours; and that when they are erected, due attention should always be paid to the proper disposal of them in our churches, and also to their adaptation to the character of the building, which is to contain them. But far more strongly may it be urged, that instead of costly monuments, memorials should be chosen, which, from being really useful, might be stamped with a more imperishable character. In pointing out another class of memorials for the dead, as substitutes for a large proportion of unimportant and unedifying monuments and tablets, the object should be to associate the names and the virtues of those who are really worthy of such commemoration with something more important and more beneficial than all that sculpture and epitaphs alone can afford. 'On the death of the head of a family of rank ual and temporal, of a neighbourhood should be or wealth, the more pressing wants, both spiritconsulted, and a parish church, a district church or chapel, a school, almshouses, or an hospital might require. If no such building or additions should be erected or enlarged, as circumstances to an existing building be called for, then let inquiries of the following kind be made. Does the body, or an aisle of the church of the parish, its chancel, porch, roof, tower, or spire, call for |