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the candor to acknowledge; and we request that the publisher of the new and beautiful edition of Keats's works now in press, with graphic illustrations of Calcott and Turner, will do us the favor and the justice to notice our conversion in his prolegomena.

Warned by our former mishap, wiser by experience, and improved, as we hope, in taste, we have to offer Mr. Tennyson our tribute of unmingled approbation; and it is very agreeable to us, as well as to our readers, that our present task will be little more than the selection, for their delight, of a few specimens of Mr. Tennyson's singular genius, and the venturing to point out, now and then, the peculiar brilliancy of some of the gems that irradiate his poetical crown.

A prefatory sonnet opens to the reader the aspirations of the young author, in which, after the manner of sundry poets, ancient and modern, he expresses his own peculiar character, by wishing himself to be something that he is not. The amorous Catullus aspired to be a sparrow; the tuneful and convivial Anacreon (for we totally reject the supposition that attributes the 'Els dúon xain yevoluηy to Alcæus) wished to be a lyre and a great drinking-cup; a crowd of more modern sentimentalists have desired to approach their mistresses as flowers, tunicks, sandals, birds, breezes, and butterflies ; all poor conceits of narrow-minded poetasters! Mr. Tennyson (though he, too, would, as far as his true-love is concerned, not unwillingly be "an earring," "a girdle," and "a necklace," p. 45) in the more serious and solemn exordium of his works ambitions a bolder metamorphosis, he wishes to be, river!

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SONNET.

"Mine be the strength of spirit fierce and free,
Like some broad river rushing down alone,”.

rivers that travel in company are too common for his taste, -
"With the self-same impulse wherewith he was thrown,”

a beautiful and harmonious line,

"From his loud fount upon the echoing lea:

Which, with increasing might, doth forward flee," –

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Every word of this line is valuable, the natural progress of human ambition is here strongly characterized, -two lines ago he would have been satisfied with the self-same impulse, but now he must have increasing might; and indeed he would require all his might to accomplish his object of fleeing forward, that is, going backwards and forwards at the same time. Perhaps he uses the word flee for flow; which latter he could not well employ in this place, it being, as we shall see, essentially necessary to rhyme to Mexico towards the end of the sonnet, as an equivalent to flow he has, therefore, with great taste and ingenuity, hit on the combination of forward flee,

"doth forward flee

By town, and tower, and hill, and cape, and isle,
And in the middle of the green salt sea

Keeps his blue waters fresh for many a mile.”

A noble wish, beautifully expressed, that he may not be confounded with the deluge of ordinary poets, but, amidst their discolored and briny ocean, still preserve his own bright tints and sweet savour. He may be at ease on this point, — he never can be mistaken for any one else. We have but too late become acquainted with him, yet we assure ourselves that if a thousand anonymous specimens were presented to us, we should unerringly distinguish his by the total absence of any particle of salt. But again, his thoughts take another turn, and he reverts to the insatiability of human ambition: we have seen him just now content to be a river, but as he flees forward, his desires expand into sublimity, and he wishes to become the great Gulf-stream of the Atlantic.

"Mine be the power which ever to its sway

Will win the wise at once,

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We, for once, are wise, and he has won us,-
"Will win the wise at once; and by degrees
May into uncongenial spirits flow,

Even as the great Gulph-stream of Florida
Floats far away into the Northern seas

The lavish growths of southern Mexico!"- p. 1.

And so concludes the sonnet.

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The next piece is a kind of testamentary paper, addressed "To a friend, we presume, containing his wishes as to what his friend should do for him when he (the poet) shall be dead, not, as we shall see, that he quite thinks that such a poet can die outright.

"Shake hands, my friend, across the brink

Of that deep grave to which I go.

Shake hands once more; I cannot sink
So far far down, but I shall know

Thy voice, and answer from below!"

Horace said "Non omnis moriar," meaning that his fame should survive, Mr. Tennyson is still more vivacious, "Non omnino moriar," "I will not die at all; my body shall be as immortal as my verse, and however low I may go, I warrant you I shall keep all my wits about me, therefore

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"When, in the darkness over me,

The four-handed mole shall scrape,
Plant thou no dusky cypress tree,

Nor wreath thy cap with doleful crape,
But pledge me in the flowing grape."

Observe how all ages become present to the mind of a great poet;

and admire how naturally he combines the funeral cypress of classical antiquity with the crape hatband of the modern undertaker. He proceeds:

“And when the sappy field and wood

Grow green beneath the showery gray,

And rugged barks begin to bud,

And through damp holts, newflushed with May,
Ring sudden laughters of the jay!"

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Laughter, the philosophers tell us, is the peculiar attribute of man, -but as Shakspeare found " tongues in trees and sermons in stones," this true poet endows all nature not merely with human sensibilities, but with human functions, the jay laughs, and we find indeed, a little further on, that the woodpecker laughs also; but to mark the distinction between their merriment and that of men, both jays and woodpeckers laugh upon melancholy occasions. We are glad, moreover, to observe, that Mr. Tennyson is prepared for, and therefore will not be disturbed by, human laughter, if any silly reader should catch the infection from the woodpeckers and jays.

"Then let wise Nature work her will,

And on my clay her darnels grow,
Come only when the days are still,

And at my head-stone whisper low,
And tell me ".

Now, what would an ordinary bard wish to be told under such circumstances? - why, perhaps, how his sweatheart was, or his child, or his family, or how the Reform Bill worked, or whether the last edition of the poems had been sold, papa! our genuine poet's first wish is

"And tell me if the woodbines blow!"

When, indeed, he shall have been thus satisfied as to the woodbines (of the blowing of which in their due season he may, we think, feel pretty secure), he turns a passing thought to his friend, and another to his mother,

"If thou art blest, my mother's smile
Undimmed"

but such inquiries, short as they are, seem too common-place, and he immediately glides back into his curiosity as to the state of the weather and the forwardness of the spring,

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No, we believe the whole circle of poetry does not furnish such another instance of enthusiasm for the sights and sounds of the vernal season! The sorrows of a bereaved mother rank after the blossoms of the woodbine, and just before the hummings of the bee; and this is all that he has any curiosity about; for he proceeds, ―

"Then cease, my friend, a little while
That I may

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send my love to my mother," or 'give you some hints about bees, which I have picked up from Aristæus, in the Elysian Fields," "tell you how I am situated as to my own personal comforts in the world below"? - oh no,

or

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the opening stanza of the piece, and, in fact, too modest; we take upon ourselves to reassure Mr. Tennyson, that, even after he shall be dead and buried, as much " sense "will still remain as he has now the good fortune to possess.

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We have quoted these two first poems in extenso, to obviate any suspicion of our having made a partial or delusive selection. We cannot afford space, we wish we could, - for an equally minute examination of the rest of the volume, but we shall make a few extracts to show, - what we solemnly affirm, that every page teems with beauties hardly less surprising.

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The Lady of Shalott is a poem in four parts, the story of which we decline to maim by such an analysis as we could give, but it opens thus,

"On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky,-
And through the field the road runs by."

The Lady of Shalott was, it seems, a spinster who had, under some unnamed penalty, a certain web to weave.

"Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early,
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel singing clearly.

"No time has she to sport or play,
A charmed web she weaves alway;
A curse is on her if she stay
Her weaving either night or day.
"She knows not,” –

Poor lady, nor we either,

"She knows not what that curse may be,

Therefore she weaveth steadily;

Therefore no other care has she,

The Lady of Shalott."

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A knight, however, happens to ride past her window, coming
"from Camelot; #

From the bank, and from the river,
He flashed into the crystal mirror, -
'Tirra lirra, tirra lirra,' (lirrar ?)

Sang Sir Launcelot."

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p. 15.

The lady stepped to the window to look at the stranger, and forgot for an instant her web: - the curse fell on her, and she died; why, how, and wherefore, the following stanzas will clearly and pathetically explain :

"A long drawn carol, mournful, holy,
She chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her eyes were darkened wholly,
And her smooth face sharpened slowly,

Turned to towered Camelot.

For ere she reached upon the tide
The first house on the water side,
Singing in her song she died,

The Lady of Shalott!
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
To the planked wharfage came;
Below the stern they read her name,

The Lady of Shalott." ―p. 19.

--

and "

We pass by two, what shall we call them?-tales, or odes, or sketches, entitled "Mariana in the South Eleänore," of which we fear we could make no intelligible extract, so curiously are they run together into one dreamy tissue, - to a little novel in rhyme, called "The Miller's Daughter." Miller's daughters, poor things, have been so generally betrayed by their sweethearts, that it is refreshing to find that Mr. Tennyson has united himself to his miller's daughter in lawful wedlock, and the poem is a history of his courtship and wedding. He begins with a sketch of his own birth, parentage, and personal appearance,

"My father's mansion, mounted high,

Looked down upon the village-spire;
I was a long and listless boy,

And son and heir unto the 'Squire."

But the son and heir of Squire Tennyson often descended from the "mansion mounted high"; and

"I met in all the close green ways,

While walking with my line and rod,"

A metonymy for "rod and line,"

"The wealthy miller's mealy face,

Like the moon in an ivy-tod.

*The same Camelot, in Somersetshire, we presume, which is alluded to by Kent in "King Lear,"

"Goose! if I had thee upon Sarum plain,

I'd drive thee cackling home to Camelot."

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