place in our usage is proved by the fact that Keats, with true insight, refused, after some experience, to complete "Hyperion" on the ground that it had too many "Miltonic inversions"-meanwhile blank-verse had been used for less imaginative or less heroical work; notably, for didactic and moralizing essays, by Cowper, Wordsworth, and other leaders of the contemplative school. or too little, but faultless as a whole. Who can read it without tears? "Godiva" and "The Gardener's Daughter" demand no less praise for descriptive felicity of another kind. But, for virile grandeur and astonishingly compact expression, there is no blank-verse poem, equally restricted as to length, that approaches the "Ulysses:" conception, imagery, and thought, are royally imaginative, and the assured hand is Tennyson's throughout. I reserve for later discussion the poet's general characteristics, fairly displayed in this volume. The great feature is its comprehensive range; it includes a finished specimen of every kind of poetry within the author's power to essay. The variety is surprising, and the novelty was no less so at the date of its appearance. Here is Tennyson's is of two kinds, one of which is suited to the heroic episodes in his idyllic poetry the first important example being the "Morte d'Arthur," which opened the volume of 1842, and is now made a portion of the Idyls of the King. I hold the verse of that poem to be his own invention, derived from the study of Homer and his natural mastery of the Saxon element in our language. Milton's Latinism is so pro-"The Talking Oak," that marvel of grace nounced as to be un-English; on the other hand, there is such affinity between the simple strength of the Homeric Greek and that of the English in which Saxon words prevail that the former can be rendered into the latter with great effect. Tennyson recognizes this in his prelude to "Morte d'Arthur," deprecating his heroics as "faint," Locksley Hall," which, despite its sentiHomeric echoes, nothing worth." But almost with the perusal of the first two lines, "So all day long the noise of battle rolled Among the mountains by the winter sea." we see that this style surpasses other blank-verse in strength and condensation. It soon became the model for a score of younger aspirants; in short, impressed itself upon the artistic mind as a new and vigorous form of our grandest English measure. The other style of Tennyson's blankverse is found in his purely idyllic pieces "The Gardener's Daughter," "Dora," "Godiva," and, upon a lower plane, such eclogues as "Audley Court" and "Edwin Morris." "St. Simeon Stylites" and "Ulysses" has each a special manner. In the first-named group, the poet brought to completeness the Victorian idyllic verse. The three are models from which he could not advance in surpassing beauty and naturalness unequalled, I say, by many of his later efforts. What Crabbe essayed in a homely fashion, now, at the touch of a finer artist, became the perfection of rural, idyllic tenderness. "Dora" is like a Hebrew pastoral, the paragon of its kind, with not a quotable detail, a line too much and fancy, the nonpareil of sustained lyrics in quatrain verse; as exquisite in filagreework as "The Rape of the Lock," with an airy beauty and rippling flow, compared with which the motion of Pope's couplets is that of partners in an eighteenth century minuet. Here is the modern lover reciting mental egoism and consolation of the heart by the head, has fine metrical quality, is fixed in literature, and furnishes genuine illustrations of the poet's time. In "The Two Voices" and "The Vision of Sin" the excess of his speculative intellect makes itself felt; but the second of these seems to me a strained and fantastic production; for which very reason, perchance, it drew the attention of semi-metaphysical persons who have no perception of the true mission of poetry, and, by a certain affectation, mistaken for subtilty, has excited more comment and analysis than it deserves. “The Day Dream," like "The Talking Oak," gives the poet an opportunity for dying. falls, mellifluous cadences, and delicately fanciful pictures. The story is made to his hand; he rarely invents a story, though often, as in the last-named poem, chancing upon the conceit of a dainty and original theme. Here, too, are "Lady Clare,' "The Lord of Burleigh," and "Edward Gray," each a simple, crystalline and flawless ballad. Nor has Tennyson ever composed, in his minor key, more enduring and suggestive little songs than "Break, break, break!" and "Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea!" both, also, in this volume. His humor, which seldom becomes him, is at its best in that half pen chronisms and impossibilities of the story seem not only lawful, but attractive. Like those of Shakespeare's comedies, they invite the reader off-hand to a purely ideal world; he seats himself upon an English lawn, as upon a Persian enchanted carpet sive, half rollicking, wholly poetic composition, dear to wits and dreamers, "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue." In this collection, too, we find his early experiments in the now famous measure of "In Memoriam." Purest and highest of all the lyrical pieces are "St. Agnes" and "Sir-hears the mystic word pronounced, and, Galahad," full of white light, and each a stainless idealization of its theme. "Sir Galahad" must be recited by a clarion voice, ere one can fully appreciate the sounding melody, the knightly, heroic ring. The poet has never chanted a more ennobling strain. Such is the excellence, and such the unusual range of a volume in which every department of poetry, except the dramatic, is exhibited in great perfection, if not at the most imaginative height. To the author's students it is a favorite among his books, as the one that fairly represents his composite genius. It powerfully affected the rising group of poets, giving their work a tendency which established its general character for the ensuing thirty years. There comes a time in the life of every aspiring artist, when if he be a painter, he tires of painting cabinet-pictures-however much they satisfy his admirers;—if a poet, he says to himself: "Enough of lyrics and idyls; let me essay a masterpiece, a sustained production, that shall bear to my former work the relation which an opera or oratorio bears to a composer's sonatas and canzonets." It may be that some feeling of this kind impelled Tennyson to write "The Princess," the theme and story of which are both his own invention. At that time he had not learned that it is as well for a poet to borrow from history or romance a tale made ready to his hands, and which his genius must transfigure. The poem is, as he entitled it, "A Medley," constructed of ancient and modern materials—a show of medieval pomp and movement, observed through an atmosphere of latterday thought and emotion; so varying, withal, in the scenes and language of its successive parts, that one may well conceive it to be told by the group of thoroughbred men and maidens who, one after another, rehearse its cantos to beguile a festive summer's day. I do not sympathize with the criticisms to which it has been subjected upon this score, and which is but the old outcry of the French classicists against Victor Hugo and the romance school. The poet, in his prelude, anticipates every stricture, and to me the ana presto! finds himself in fairy-land. Moreover, Tennyson's special gift of reducing incongruous details to a common structure and tone is fully illustrated in a poem made. "to suit with Time and place, But not often has a lovelier story been re- art. 66 66 The tournament scene, at the close of the fifth book, is the most vehement and rapid passage to be found in the whole range of Tennyson's poetry. By an approach to the Homeric swiftness, it presents a contrast to the laborious and faulty movement of much of his narrative verse. The songs, added in the second edition of his poem, reach the high-water mark of lyrical composition. Few will deny that, taken together, the five melodies: As through the land," "Sweet and low," "The splendor falls on castle walls," Home they brought her warrior dead," and "Ask me no more!" that these constitute the finest group of songs produced in our century; and the third, known as the "Bugle Song," seems to many the most perfect English lyric since the time of Shakespeare. In "The Princess" we also find Tennyson's most successful studies upon the model of the Theocritan isometric verse. He was the first to enrich our poetry with this class of melodies, for the burlesque pastorals of the eighteenth century need not be considered. Not one of the blank-verse songs in his Arthurian Epic equals in structure or feeling the "Tears, idle tears," and "O swallow, swallow, flying, flying south!" Again, what witchery of landscape and action; what fair women and brave men, who, if they be somewhat stagy and traditional, at least are more sharply defined than the actors in our poet's other romances. Besides, "The Princess" has a distinct purpose the illustration of woman's struggles, aspirations and proper sphere; and the conclusion is one wherewith the instincts of cultured people are so thoroughly in accord, that some are used to answer, when asked to present their view of the "woman question:" "You will find it at the close of The Princess.'" Those who disagree with Tennyson's presentation acknowledge that if it be not true it is well told. His Ida is, in truth, a beautiful and heroic figure: Of the author's shortcomings in this and other poems, we have to speak in a future article. I leave "The Princess," deeming it the most varied and interesting of his works with respect to freshness and invention. All mankind love a story-teller such as Tennyson, by this creation, proved himself to be. In the youth of poets it is the material value of their work that makes it precious, and for certain gifts of language and color we esteem one more highly than another. When a sweet singer dies prematurely, we lament his loss; but in a poet's later years character and intellect begin to tell. His other gifts being equal, he who has the more vigorous mind will draw ahead of his fellows, and take the front position. Tennyson, like Browning, Procter, Arnold, has that which Keats was bereft of, and which Wordsworth possessed in full measure-the gift of years, and must be judged according to his fortune. In mental ability he comes near to the greatest of the five, and in synthetic grasp, surpasses them all. Arnold's thought is wholly included in Tennyson; if you miss Browning's psychology, you find a more varied analysis, qualified by wise restraint. His intellectual growth has steadily progressed, and is reflected in the nature of his successive poems. At the age of forty a man, blessed with a sound mind in a sound body, should reach the maturity of his intellectual power. At such a period, in the year 1850, Tennyson produced "In Memoriam," his most characteristic and significant work: not so ambitious as his epic of King Arthur, but more distinctively a poem of this century, and displaying the author's genius in a subjective form. In it are concentrated his wisest reflections upon life, death, and immortality, the worlds within and without, while the whole song is so largely uttered, and so pervaded with the singer's manner, that any isolated line is recognized at once. This work stands by itself: none can essay another upon its model, without yielding every claim to personality and at the risk of an inferiority that would be appalling. The strength of Tennyson's intellect has full sweep in this elegiac poem-the great threnody of our language, by virtue of unique conception and power. "Lycidas," with its primrose beauty and varied lofty flights, is but the extension of a theme set by Moschus and Bion. Shelley, in "Adonais," despite his spiritual ecstacy and splendor of lament, followed the same masters yes, and took his landscape and imagery from distant climes. Swinburne's dirge for Baudelaire is a wonder of melody; nor do we forget the "Thyrsis " of Arnold, and other modern ventures in a direction where the sweet and absolute solemnity of the Saxon tongue is most apparent. Still, as an original and intellectual production, "In Memoriam" is beyond them all a more important, though possibly no more enduring, creation of rhythmic art. and The metrical form of this work deserves attention. The author's choice of the transposed-quatrain verse was a piece of good fortune. Its hymnal quality, finely exemplified in the opening prayer, is always impressive, and, although a monotone, no more monotonous than the sounds of nature-the murmur of ocean, the soughing of the mountain pines. Were" In Memoriam" written in direct quatrains 1 think the effect would grow to be unindurable. The work as a whole is built up of successive lyrics, each expressing a single phase of the the poet's sorrow-brooding thought; and here again is followed the method of nature, which evolves cell after cell, and, joining each to each, constructs the sentient organization. But Tennyson's art-instincts are always perfect; he does the fitting thing, and rarely seeks through eccentric and curious movements to attract the popular regard. As to scenery, imagery, and general treatment, “In Memoriam is eminently a British poem. The grave, majestic, hymnal measure swells like the peal of an organ, yet acts as a brake on undue, spasmodic outbursts of discordant grief. A steady, yet varying marche funèbre; a sense of passion held in check, of reserved elegiac power. For the strain is everywhere calm. even in rehearsing a by-gone violence of emotion, along its passage from woe to desolation and anon, by tranquil stages, to reverence, thought, aspiration, endurance, hope. On sea and shore the elements are calm; even the wild winds and snows of winter are brought in hand, and made subservient, as the bells ring out the dying year, to the new birth of Nature and the sure purpose of eternal God. Critical objections are urged against "In Memoriam;" mostly, in my opinion, such as more fitly apply to poems upon a lower grade. It is said to present a confusion of religion and skepticism, an attempt to reconcile faith and knowledge, to blend the feeling of Dante with that of Lucretius; but, if this be so, the author only follows the example of his generation, and the more faithfully gives voice to its spiritual questionings. Even here he is accused of "idealizing the thoughts of his contemporaries;" to which we rejoin, in the words of another, "that great writers do not anticipate the thought of their age; they but anticipate its expression." His scientific language and imagery are also censured, but do not his efforts in this direction, tentative as they are, constitute a special merit? Failing, as others have, to reconcile poetry and metaphysics, he succeeds better in speculations inspired by the revelations of the lens and laboratory. Why should not such facts be taken into account? The phenomenal stage of art is passing away, and all things, even poetic diction and metaphor, must endure a change. It is absurd to think that a man like Tennyson will rest content with ignoring or misstating what has become every-day knowledge. The spiritual domain is still the poets own; but let his illustrations be derived from living truths, rather than from the worn and ancient fables of the pastoral age. A certain writer declares that Tennyson shows sound sense instead of imaginative power. Not only sense, methinks, but "the sanity of true genius;" and the Strephon-and-Chloë singers must change their tune, or be left without a hearing. A charge requiring more serious consideration is that the sorrow of "In Mememoriam " is but food for thought, a passion of the head, not of the heart. The poet, however, has reached a philosophical zenith of his life, far above ignoble weakness, and performs the office which an enfranchised spirit might well require of him : building a mausoleum of immortal verse, conceiving his friend as no longer dead, but as having solved the mysteries they so often have discussed together. If there is didacticism in the poem, it is a teaching which leads ad astra, by a path strictly within the province of an elegiac minstrel's song. For the rest," In Memoriam" is a serene and truthful panorama of refined experiences; filled with pictures of gentle, scholastic life, and of English scenery through all the changes of a rolling year; expressing, moreover, the thoughts engendered by these changes. When too somber, it is lightened by sweet reminiscences; when too light, recalled to grief by stanzas that have the deep solemnity of a passing bell. Among its author's productions it is the one most valued by educated and professional readers. Recently, a number of authors having been asked to name three leading poems of this century which they would most prefer to have written, each gave "In Memoriam" either the first or second place upon his list. Obviously it is not a work to read at a sitting, nor to take up in every mood, but one in which we are sure to find something of worth in every stanza. It contains more notable sayings than any other of Tennyson's poems. The wisdom, yearnings, and aspirations of a noble mind, are here; curious reasoning for once is not out of place; the poet's imagination, shut in upon itself, strives to irradiate with inward light the mystic problems of life. the close, Nature's eternal miracle is made symbolic of the soul's palingenesis, and the tender and beautiful epithalamium tranquilizes the reader with the thought of the dear common joys which are the heritage of every living kind. END OF PART I. THE DOCTOR'S WIFE. to be in high good humor with her lot in life, stupidity and squint included. A certain indefinable something about the girl, would prevent any one from hinting a disagreeable truth to her. The same impalpable reserve or old fashioned courtesy in her too, made the boys who skated and raced with her treat her with a respect which they did not show to the Lilys and Violets. Her condition on graduation-day would have been pitiable if her placid good humor had not made it exasperating. One of the class was going to sail as mis DR. Noyes married, I think, somewhere about '68 or '9. There is very little to be said about his wife. Mrs. Sarah Fanning, indeed, gave a decisive verdict upon her at first sight. "She is one of the rank and file of Humanity," said she; "one of the weightless molecules that go to make up the mass." (Mrs. Fanning was that brilliant little woman from Andover, Mass., who essayed to take the well known Mrs. Rush's place in Philadelphia that winter. She used to give weekly reunions-without supper; she cannot understand, even now, why she could not "form a literary nu-sionary to Africa: we all made a heroic cleus" there.) Nobody contradicted her verdict; she always claimed Humanity as her own preempted property; and besides, there really was so little to say about the Doctor's wife! Mrs. Fanning remarked that an American woman, if no other, ought to have some salient points, good or bad, to justify her right to live, and this woman was an American of the Americans, descended on one side from a colonial Maryland family, and on the other, of Pennsylvania Quaker stock, a race of reformers, who lived only for great ideas. But there was absolutely nothing in the creature-nothing! It was inexplicable, by all the rules of race!" The little lady's speciality, by the bye, was "race " and "strains of blood." She could lay her finger on the very great-grandfather from whom you inherited your long upper-lip or gluttonous propensities, and reason for you, out of these inheritances, such sequences of fatalism that your Christianity tottered quite to its foundations. 66 Now there had been no salient points about the Doctor's wife when she was a fat baby, or a girl at school. Dode Mear was daily set down as a dunce in every class, from spelling up to International Law, and daily took up her book with a cheerful It really is too bad in me," and went out with fresh zeal to skate and run races with the boys. If she had been one of the delicate "Lilys" and "Violets" whom the other girls set apart to adore, her lack of brains could have been overlooked; but she was a short, thickset little body, with a shock of red hair tied back from a freckled face which was lighted by laughing blue eyes, -eyes in which there was an undeniable cast. She never, however, gave a hint of her opinion of herself, and always seemed martyr of her; we all looked forward with hysteric enthusiasm to speedily becoming famous authors, leaders in society, or at least, wives and mothers. Trustees and faculty spoke and prayed at us, the very air kindled with hope and fervor; and there sat that plump little dunce at the foot of the bench, smelling a bunch of the red Burgundy roses, of which she was so fond, quite contented to be a cipher now and in the future! Here she was again, Dr. Noyes's wife, shapeless and freckled and bright-eyed as ever: but the ugly hair was always delicately coiffured, and her simple dress a marvel of exquisite art. She did not care in the least that everybody believed that she had sold herself for an establishment. Why else should a girl of her age marry a cynical, soured widower of fifty, with a half dozen hobble-de-hoys of sons? "Dr. Noyes," Mrs. Fanning said, "was an ambitious man, thwarted in his aims, by the drudgery of supporting a family. He should have chosen an intellectual woman as his second wife, who could have helped him to regain his lost ground." The Doctor's mistake was soon apparent in his wife's course. The faded carpets and hair-cloth sofas were swept out of the dreary old house. The money spent in making it bright and pretty, as Mrs. Fanning said, would have kept open a soup house all winter: Noyes's old friends, instead of smoking their meerschaums in his dusty office, came in now to cozy dinners, where each man found his favorite dish: his wife had a fine taste in cookery, it appears in that, as in every thing else she took life with zest and joyously: the Noyeboys, who had begun to hang around Variety theatres and engine-houses, gave a |