III. CRITICAL COMMENTS "We have remarked five distinct excellencies of his own manner. First, his luxuriance of imagination, and, at the same time, his control over it. Secondly, his power of embodying himself in ideal characters, or, rather, moods of character, with such extreme accuracy of adjustment that the circumstances of the narration seem to have a natural correspondence with the predominant feeling, and, as it were, to be evolved from it by assimilative force. Thirdly, his vivid, picturesque delineation of objects and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them fused, to borrow a metaphor from science, in a medium of strong emotion. Fourthly, the variety of his lyrical measures and exquisite modulation of harmonious words and cadences to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed. Fifthly, the elevated habits of thought, implied in these compositions, and imparting a mellow soberness of tone, more impressive to our minds than if the author had drawn up a set of opinions in verse and sought to instruct the understanding, rather than to communicate the love of beauty to the heart.” - A. H. HALLAM. "After all that may be said about the absurdity and incoherence of the story, it certainly produces the impression of reality in a degree which, when the nature of the incidents is considered, must be thought truly wonderful. So vividly and clearly does the poet delineate the creatures of his fancy that we cannot help viewing them as actual existences. We find ourselves sympathizing with the Prince, and wishing him success in his arduous suit. We feel the rush of breathless expectation in the hot mêlée of the tourney. We wait anxiously the turn of fate beside the sickbed of the wounded lover. We give him our heartiest congratulations on his eventual recovery and success It is only when we set ourselves to criticising that we are struck with the improbability of that which moved us, and become ashamed of our former feelings. In no former production has the author succeeded in giving so much the air of reality to the objects of his imagination; nor has he shown in any one so much delicacy and distinctness in the delineation of character.". -JAMES HADLEY. "The poem of The Princess, as a work of art, is the most complete and satisfying of all Tennyson's works. It possesses a play of fancy, of humor, of pathos, and of passion which give it variety; while the feeling of unity is unbroken throughout. It is full of passages of the rarest beauty and most exquisite workmanship. The songs it contains are unsurpassed in English literature. The diction is drawn from the treasure-house of old English poetry, from Chaucer, from Shakespeare, and the poets of the Elizabethan age. The versification is remarkable for its variety; while the rhythm, in stateliness and expression, is modelled upon Milton. There are passages which, in power over language to match sound with sense, are not excelled by anything in Paradise Lost for strength, or in Milton's minor poems for sweetness. The poem abounds also in evidences of the prophetic insight which has already been referred to as the mark of a true poet. In the year 1847, long before Darwin had commenced the present great revolution in scientific thought, evolutionary theories were propounded by the poet in the imaginary halls of his female university. Huxley himself could not have sketched more vividly than the Lady Psyche the progressive development of the world from the primal cosmic vapor. The Princess, with the accuracy taught only recently by the spectroscope, calls the sun 'a nebulous star.' When she gets her mind off the brooch, she becomes really profound in her analysis of our notions of creation as stages of successive acts. Our minds, she teaches, are so constituted that we must of necessity apprehend everything in the form and aspect of successive time; but, in the Almighty fiat, 'Let there be light,' the whole of the complex potentialities of the universe were in fact hidden."-S. E. DAWSON. "The affections cannot be repressed; without love, life is unfinished. Apart from this underlying motive, which rises to the surface only with the end of the poem, The Princess is little but a dreamy story to read in a garden on a summer afternoon, full of music, and fuller still of rich and suggestive imagery. The insertion of the songs, delicate and beautiful in themselves, serves only to accentuate the artificiality of the whole work. Tennyson's detractors are ready to accuse him of over-refinement; of an eye too prone to color, and an ear too sensitive to melody, losing in their rapture the sights and sounds of the real, eternal truth. If such accusation were to be urged, it could perhaps, be best urged from an analysis of The Princess. For here Tennyson is in his dreamiest and his least virile mood; here he indulges his senses to the waste of his thought. There is a time for everything; and The Princess is not without its special charm. It is not Tennyson's highest work, neither is it his lowest; it merely requires a sympathetic temperament in the reader to appear satisfying. It needs a temperament of momentary laziness, apt to languor and inclined to a light satire, which shall not busy itself to wound too deeply. With this mind, we shall find The Princess a storehouse of good things, a midsummer day's dream with a spell and fantasy that hold us to the end." - ARTHUR WAUGH. "The Princess enshrines the woman's question as it appeared nearly fifty years ago; and, considering all that has been done since then, it is a prophetic utterance. He has touched with grace and clearness a number of the phases of opinion which now prevail, and which then had only begun to prevail, embodying each phase in one of his characters. The woman's question owes a great deal to The Princess." STOPFORD A. BROOKE. "The Princess is undoubtedly Tennyson's greatest effort, if not exactly in comedy, in a vein verging towards the comic a side on which he was not so well equipped for offence or for defence as on the other. But it is a masterpiece. Exquisite as its author's verse always is, it was never more exquisite than here, whether in blank verse or in the (superadded) lyrics; while none of his deliberately arranged plays contains characters half so good as those of the Princess herself, of Lady Blanche and Lady Psyche, of Cyril, of the two kings, and even of one or two others, and that, glanced at, enabled him to carry off whatever was fantastical in the conception with almost unparalleled felicity. It may or may not be agreed that the question of the equality of the sexes is one of the distinguishing questions of this century; and some of those who would give it that position may or may not maintain, if they think it worth while, that it is treated here too lightly, while their opponents may wish that it had been treated more lightly still. But this very difference will point the unbiassed critic to the same conclusion, that Tennyson has hit the golden mean; while that, whatever he has hit or missed in subject, the verse of his essay is golden, no one who is competent will doubt. Such lyrics as 'The splendor falls,' and 'Tears, idle tears,' such blank verse as that of the closing passage, would raise to the topmost heights of poetry whatever subject it was spent upon."-GEORGE SAINTSBURY. I wish to acknowledge my grateful obligation to Mr. Fullerton L. Waldo, of the Pomfret School, Pomfret Centre, Connecticut, and to Mr. Alexander Wheeler, of the Bridgeport High School, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, for practical suggestions; and to Dr. Eleanor P. Hammond, of the University of Chicago, for assistance in matters of scholarship. WELLESLEY COLLEGE, 1900. MARY BOWEN. THE PRINCESS A MEDLEY PROLOGUE SIR WALTER VIVIAN all a summer's day 10 And me that morning Walter show'd the house, 20 Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere, |