Lines like these can only be written by a man who year after year has lain quiet out of doors, motionless, till the pretty brutes came out and played or went about their business all round him.

These illustrations everyone may pursue for himself; but, after all, the point needs no labouring. Most of us remember the passage in Cranford where the gentleman farmer takes shame to himself because he has lived all his life in the country, yet never found out that ash buds were black in March till this new poet told him to look at them. The power of observation, at least in so far as regards tree and flower life, was never carried further, nor ever joined with a more perfect felicity of expression. And in the larger business of suggesting whole landscapes by a few touches, Tennyson has no master. His landscape is never put there for its own sake; he never indulges idly in word-painting; it is part and parcel of the story or the thought. This again one could prove by endless quotation, but I need only extract two passages from the In Memoriam, whose application to contrasted moods, or rather to moods that succeed as storm follows calm, everyone will remember:

Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro' the faded leaf

The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main.

The poet has the advantage of the painter in that he can appeal to more senses than one; and it is

worth noticing how the very spirit of autumn is caught in the first stanza by the evocation of sound. There is sound too in the companion poem, though a very different sound:

To-night the winds begin to rise

And roar from yonder dropping day:
The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies;

The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea;

And wildly dash'd on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world.

The great masters of landscape painting have been English; but neither Constable nor Turner has felt more finely or rendered more completely the grace or majesty of form, the glow or purity of colour, and the living play of light and shade, than this painter in words, in whom the love of these was so intense that it inspired his art with what is no less than a magic of evocation.

Chapter VII.

The Poems.

Such criticism as the preceding pages contain has been directed primarily to Tennyson's ideas or habits of mind, and I pass now to a general consideration of the poems. Of these the Idylls, as has been already shown, appeared to the poet's own generation by far the most important - the consummate achievement of his life. They detach themselves cleanly from the rest of his work, and must be dealt with in a separate chapter. Here

it need only be said, that in my judgment Tennyson will take rank in the eyes of posterity, not by the Idylls, but by Maud and In Memoriam; that is, not by his work in narrative, but by the greatest of his lyrics. Maud and In Memoriam are essentially lyrical, not only in form but in feeling; yet they represent very different aspects of the poet's nature. In Memoriam, with its "short swallow flights of song", is mainly the poetry of reflection--of close thought fused by strong emotion into the fire of poetry; Maud is first and foremost a rendering of passion in its different moods; and such thought as enters into the framework of the poem comes in moments of reaction, and is tinged deeply with the colour of love. Probably in all generations men will prefer the one poem or the other according to their temperament; but it seems to me clear that they rank in importance above Tennyson's other work. there are many things among the shorter pieces in no way inferior to the finest passages in either, and these also make an integral part of the basis on which his reputation will rest.

Yet

Maud, In Memoriam, The Princess, and the plays are criticised in some detail elsewhere in the course of this volume. Before criticising the great mass of the shorter poems one must attempt some sort of grouping. A large number of the most important are in form dramatic monologues, where a character is made to express his or her personality, or tell a life history in one protracted speech or soliloquy. Next to these come the English Idyls-written for the most part in blank verse (but occasionally with songs interspersed)—which are highly wrought narratives of domestic life. Besides these two classes there is a mass of poems in rhyme, chiefly ballads or pure lyrics. In the former sometimes the narrative element preponderates, as in The

Revenge or The Charge of the Light Brigade; sometimes the lyrical, as in The Lady of Shalott or Sir Galahad. The pure lyrics vary from abstract meditations like Vastness or The Higher Pantheism, or again from the magnificent threnody upon Wellington, to the simplicity of a bird's song. Nor must we forget the occasional poems, such as the addresses to the Queen and other members of the Royal Family, or the letter to F. D. Maurice. Last of all must be placed the verses written leviore plectro-The Talking Oak, The Day Dream, Will Waterproof, and the like. The poems in dialect form a class by themselves; they are all humorous dramatic monologues; and one is tempted at the risk of a cross-division to make another separate class of the poems upon subjects drawn from the classical mythology. The Juvenilia I omit from this classification, as they have only a historic and technical interest for posterity, except The Poet, which is a fine lyric, and Mariana, which belongs properly to a group that I do not know how to describe-except as picture poems.

Criticism naturally directs itself first to the poems upon classical subjects, for in these Tennyson first achieved a masterpiece. Enone and The LotosEaters, though not in their consummate form, were included in the volume of 1833. Ulysses was written almost directly after the death of Arthur Hallam, and Tithonus (though not published till Thackeray begged a poem for the Cornhill twentyfive years later) was unearthed from an old notebook of that same date.

It is easy enough to see why Tennyson should have made his first successes here. This was not raw material that he wrought in, but the stuff of poetry handled for three thousand years by poets; old myths already made beautiful, yet pregnant for every man with a fresh significance. Ulysses is

true to the temper of the Ithacan as we know him in Homer; but it was written to express the poet's own revolt against despondency after the death of his friend. There is no need to quote what everyone knows by heart; but I cannot imagine an age which should be indifferent to Ulysses. It is for all ages; but stamped with the impress of a period in which intellectual adventure was rife, an age of discovery.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

Enone is hardly less perfect; it is essentially a poem of description as Ulysses is of character. Yet, just as in the end of Ulysses you find one of Tennyson's finest landscape effects, so in Enone you find the completest expression-in the speech of Pallas-that Tennyson ever gave to his moral code. The motive which most stirred his spiritthe hope of a future life-was out of place when his scene was laid among the Greeks; but his worship of law could nowhere more fitly be expressed. Yet the spirit of the poem is not Greek: it recalls indeed the Sicilian Muse of Theocritus, but far more closely the narrative style of Virgil in his Georgics or Eclogues.

Tithonus, again, is a Greek story, but not treated in the classic spirit. In most of the Greek or Roman references to the legend Tithonus is immortal and immortally young; nowhere is this tragedy of "immortal age beside immortal youth" insisted on. And it is strange and characteristic that Tennyson should have been content to tell the story merely as a story, with no suggestion of any symbolism. All that he cares for is to give the picture; to keep all the beauty and the