And down the streaming crystal dropt, and she Naked, a double light in air and wave, To meet her Graces, where they deck'd her out We could quote not a few other passages the meaning of which eludes the grasp when we seek to lay hold of it, like those insects which are provided with slippery cases by way of protection. The third defect we heretics discern is akin to the last; it is an occasional want of truth in imagery and diction. Mr. Tennyson's similes and metaphors for the most part are just and beautiful, and show the fine microscopic eye which every true poet has conjoined with wide and deep vision: as, for instance, that contained in the line, more crumpled than a poppy from the sheath.' No flower conveys such an image of disorder as does the poppy, from the number and looseness of its petals; and this observation is as delicate as that of Shakspeare in his cinquespotted cowslip,' and Milton's 'pansy freaked with jet.' But now and then Mr. Tennyson presents us with a similitude in which the likeness is at best very latent. For example, 'I babbled for you, as babies for the moon, Vague brightness.'-p. 86. No brightness can be more distinct than that of the moon. Perhaps there is not an object in nature which it is less allowable to take liberties with than this luminary. We cannot forbear from noticing a fancy which Mr. Tennyson adopted from Shelley, and which we dare to pronounce a falsetto. 'Hast thou heard,' says he to his 'shadowy, dreaming Adeline,' "With what voice the violet woos To his heart the silver dews? To the mosses underneath?' How dissonant is this notion of ringing (a mere play upon words) from the spirit and genius of the flowery people-how alien from the soft, silent, succulent realm of flowers! Does it not seem, when the rainbow shines out after the storm, a sign of elemental peace restored, as if the stillness of that gleamy kingdom, along with its gay colours, had stolen into the sky? Well has it been said of those voiceless, noiseless fair ones, that They thread the earth in silence, in silence build their bowers, on on the score of their few spots, so precisely stated by Shakspeare, they are to be accounted literary characters, what a fund of mysterious literature must we ascribe to the foxglove, richly speckled as it is, like the lark's breast, on the inside of its bulging blossom! Our poet, too, persists in comparing a merry fair one's laugh to the screaming of jays and woodpeckers, which is no compliment to the ladies. Sir Walter Scott did not mean to compliment them when he described '-the cry of women, shrill As gosshawk's whistle on the hill, It is said, indeed, that, at one season, the woodpecker utters sounds resembling boisterous laughter; but at all times his voice appears to issue from a wooden throat, and his wild cry is in general so dolorously plaintive, that, in troubling the silence of the woods, it seems to express his efforts and his sufferings, and even to confirm whatever the sentimental zoologist, Buffon, has imagined concerning the mean and slavish misery-all work and no playof woodpecker existence! The pensiveness of cowslips and joyousness of larks has a kind of objective reality-not so the merriment of bluebells and mirth of woodpeckers. To write thus is not to pick Nature's pocket,' but to fill it with false coin. The best apology for Mr. Tennyson is to say, as we truly can, that these unrealities of description, so common in modern poetry, are not common, though too frequent, in his.* Again, Mr. Tennyson is most audacious in the manufacture and perversion of vocables. He turns adjectives into substantives ad libitum, and creates more new adverbs than the Whigs, to carry a point, have ever made peerages. Dante and Milton used a similar licence of coining words; it is said, indeed, that the former had *We do not encounter in classic authors, ancient or modern, these chance kaleidoscope combinations; but the more closely we examine their miniature portraits of natural objects the more faithful we find them. There can be little doubt that, could the ancient hyacinth be resuscitated, a true A 1 would be found upon its leaves, or at least a nearer resemblance to those letters than can be discerned in the brown warts of the tiger-lily, with which Professor Martin identifies that famous flower. The hyacinth must certainly have been a kind of turn-cap lily with a bulbous root; but probably the species has perished, for the inscription is said to have been formed by veins; the tiger-lily has no veins on its petal, and is surely too coarse a flower to have been distinguished by poets, as was the hyacinth. Perhaps the learned Professor did not bear in mind how much those floral accidents, spots, veins, colour, size and number of petals, depend on soil and culture and the florist's art. The little wild flowers remain the same from age to age, while the larger and more showy products of the garden are always varying. Much more happy is the Professor in his suggestion respecting the ligustrum-that it is not the privet, which is neither very white nor specially perishable, but the bindweed or large wild convolvulus, which hangs its snowy drapery over the hedges, and soon folds it up into discoloured scrolls-the very emblem of fairness and caducity. Alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur,' to to form the language in which he wrote; still, from the exigencies of his triple-rhymed metre he seems to have used words in a peculiar sense, a sense never generally adopted. Neither did Milton succeed in bringing all his latinisms into general use. But these writers were great enough to consecrate all their novelties and idiosyncrasies; whereas coined words in poems of less weight and reach give them an air of weakness and eccentricity rather than of originality and strength. The only touchstone of desert' in such enterprises as these is 'success.' Mr. Tennyson speaks of a tent as being 'lamp-lit from the inner.' This is not English, unless he can make it so. His liberties of speech, however, are not so numerous in the present work as in his earlier performances. A very prevalent fault of style in the present day is one which is sometimes censured under the name of diffuseness, but which may be more properly termed profuseness, and seems to arise, not from rapidity in composing, but from haste in finishing a foe to real completeness-with the desire to be ever producing an effect, and to hear the shout of applause at every utterance of the Muse, as the mountains re-echo the voice that loudly salutes them. When models of literary excellence were produced in former ages, a writer probably contemplated his work as a whole while he was executing it in detail, and thus kept the detail in order, compressing his matter within a certain sphere to the exclusion or preclusion of much that might be good in itself; whereas now-a-days men pour out sentence after sentence, scene after scene, and think there can be no diffuseness where no idle words are used in the expression of each thought. Poetry, from its nature, is less liable to this defect than prose, and to say that it characterizes the compositions of Mr. Tennyson would be unjust -but they are not free from the fault of nimiety. Can the uninspired critic know better than the inspired poet what suits the spirit of his strain? Sometimes, and to some extent, we think, he can; and for this reason, that he has but to be passive and receive the impression, whereas the poet's task is twofold; he has to feel and to express, and in some cases the active part of his business may interfere with the passive part; especially when he resumes a poetic work after the hour of original inspiration is past. 'The Princess' could supply us with but too many instances of apparently elaborate exaggeration. Thus after the lines already quoted in description of the eight daughters of the plough' that stood behind Ida's judgment seat, we read that each of them was like a spire of land that stands apart,' Cleft from the main, and clang'd about with mews.' Again—when the Lady Blanche stoops to updrag Melissa :''She, half on her mother propt, Half-drooping from her, turn'd her face, and cast A Niobean daughter, one arm out, Appealing to the bolts of Heaven !'—p. 83. Although the versification of The Princess' is upon the whole agreeable to the ear, yet we regret that it was not rendered smoother and richer throughout. Doubtless it is more difficult to avoid weak and rough lines in a narrative which must comprehend matter not in itself poetic, circumstances and details that are to be succinctly told, than in a composition more limited in its plan; and this may be the sole reason why more of these occur within a given space in The Princess' than in 'none' and 'The Gardener's Daughter;' for in some passages the blank verse of the Medley' is not inferior to any that he has published. The faults of the poem are soon numbered and ticketed: it is more difficult to do justice to its beauties, for beauty, like happiness, consists of many small parts, and is diffused,-is to be felt more than expressed; while defects, like sorrows and misfortunes, are easily defined. We may describe the characteristic merits. of The Princess,' however, by saying that it unites abundance of lovely imagery with dramatic power. The actors of the piece are all alive; their characters are well delineated by a few strokes, and their emotions are expressed with energy and animation. The early and concluding portions are the happiest; the former in a sportive, the latter in a more serious vein. We must quote a description of undergraduate relaxation in the gardens of Ida's college: • At last a solemn grace Concluded, and we sought the gardens: there In this hand held a volume as to read, And smoothed a petted peacock down with that: Or under arches of the marble bridge Hung, shadow'd from the heat: some hid and sought They They wish'd to marry; they could rule a house; That harm'd not.'-pp. 45, 46. The account of the tourney-fight is extremely spirited, and the first of two songs sung in the tent, where Ida and her company rest after the excursion, is very beautiful to read, though scarcely fit for a harp accompaniment. It runs thus: 'Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; Dear as remember'd kisses after death, O Death in Life, the days that are no more.' - p. 66. In narrative and dramatic poems each part depends greatly for its full effect on what goes before and what follows after. Neither the gay variety of the tale in its earlier stages, nor the deeper passion of the later ones, can be appreciated in fragments; and the beauties of this poem approve themselves more on a second perusal, when we read for the sake of the beauties only, and the sense of incongruity is merged in the effect of the whole, than on a first one. It is not without reluctance, therefore, that we detach from the context a part of the description of Psyche's reunion with her child :: Psyche ever stole A little nearer, till the babe that by us, A blind |