French classicists against Victor Hugo and the Romance school. The poet, in his prelude, anticipates every stricture, and to me the anachronisms 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, hears the mystic word pronounced, and, presto! finds himself in fairyland. 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, A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, This were a medley! we should have him back But not often has a lovelier story been recited. After the idyllic introduction, the body of the poem is composed in a semi-heroic verse. Other works of our poet are greater, but none is so fascinating as this romantic tale; English throughout, yet combining the England of Cœur de Leon with that of Victoria in one bewitching picture. Some of the author's most delicately musical lines are herein contained, and the ending of each canto is an effective piece of art. 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 this poem reach the high-water mark of lyrical composition. Few will deny that, taken together, the five melodies, "As thro' 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. No one of the blank-verse songs in his Arthurian epic equals in structure or feeling the "Tears, idle tears" and "Oh 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. 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. - E. C. STEDMAN. Yet in "The Princess," perhaps, Mr. Tennyson rises higher still. The idyllic manner alternates with the satiric, the pathetic, even the sublime, by such imperceptible gradations and continual delicate variations of key that the harmonious medley of his style becomes the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet harmonious fairyland in which his fancy ranges. In this work, too, Mr. Tennyson shows himself more than ever the poet of the day. In it more than ever the old is interpenetrated with the new-the domestic and scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He dares in every page to make use of modern words and notions, from which the mingled clumsi ness and archaism of his compeers shrinks as unpoetical. Though, as we just said, his stage is an ideal fairy-land, yet he has reached the ideal by the only true method-by bringing the Middle Age forward to the Present one, and not by ignoring the Present to fall back on a cold and galvanized Mediævalism; and thus he makes his "Medley" a mirror of the nineteenth century, possessed of its own new art and science, its own new temptations and aspirations, and yet grounded on, and continually striving to reproduce, the forms and experiences of all past time. The idea, too, of "The Princess" is an essentially modern one. In every age women have been tempted, by the possession of superior beauty, intellect, or strength of will, to deny their own womanhood and attempt to stand alone as men, whether on the ground of political intrigue, ascetic saintship, or philosophic pride. Cleopatra and St. Hedwiga, Madame de Staël and the Princess are merely different manifestations of the same self-willed and proud longing of woman to unsex herself and realize, single and self-sustained, some distorted and partial notion of her own as to what the "angelic life" should be. Cleopatra acted out the pagan idea of an angel; St. Hedwiga the mediæval one; Madame de Staël, with the peculiar notions of her time as to what "spirituel" might mean; and in "The Princess" Mr. Tennyson has embodied the ideal of that nobler, wider, purer, yet equally fallacious, because equally unnatural, analogue, which we may meet too often up and down England now. He shows us the woman, when she takes her stand on the false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral punishment by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh; not even her vast purposes of philanthropy can preserve her, but on her own self-will they change, they fall, they become inconsistent even as she does herself, till at last she loses all feminine sensibility; scornfully and stupidly she rejects and misunderstands the heart of man; and then, falling from pride to sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity, she punishes sisterly love as a crime, robs the mother of her child, and becomes all but a vengeful fury, with all the peculiar faults of woman and none of the peculiar excellencies of man.-CHARLES KINGSLEY. "The Princess" is a fairy tale as sentimental as those of Shakspeare. Tennyson here thought and felt like a young knight of the Renaissance. The mark of this kind of mind is a superabundance, as it were-a superfluity of tap. In the characters of "The Princess," as in those of "As You Like It," there is an over-fulness of fancy and emotion. They have recourse, to express their thought, to all ages and lands; they carry speech to the most reckless rashness; they clothe and burden every idea with a sparkling image, which drags and glitters around it like a brocade clustered with jewels. Their nature is over-rich; at every shock there is in them a sort of rustle of joy, anger, desire; they live more than we-more warmly and more quickly. They are ever in excess, refined, ready to weep, laugh, adore, jest, inclined to mingle adoration and jests, urged by a nervous rapture to opposite extremes. They sally in the poetic field with impetuous and ever-changing caprice and joy. To satisfy the subtlety and superabundance of their invention they need fairy tales and masquerades. In fact "The Princess" is both. - H. A. ΤΑΙΝΕ. STUDY OF “IN MEMORIAM." Tennyson's genius may be said to have reached maturity in "In Memoriam," a series of lyrics published in 1850, recording his love and sorrow for his chosen friend, Henry Hallam, the eldest son of the great English historian, who had died seventeen years before. It is the most subjective of the poet's works, and by many regarded as most characteristic. Of all Tennyson's poems this is the student's favorite. Its wise sayings and philosophical teachings render it fit for thought and meditation. It is said that a company of authors, in selecting the three poems of this century which each would most prefer to have composed, mentioned "In Memoriam" either as the first or second choice in every instance. Selected Lyrics. Description of a Morn, xi. The Question, lxiii. Philosophy of Human History, cxvii. QUOTATIONS. "Never morning wore To evening but some heart did break." "And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought, "I hold it true whate'er befall, I feel it when I sorrow most; Thou madest man, he knows not why. To put in words the grief I feel; To which the whole creation moves." CRITICISMS. Tennyson's masterpiece.--London Eclectic Review. "In Memoriam" is the most exquisite creation by any |