cataracts—a word he uses to suggest the roar and white

ness of the waters as they fall :

Tho' heapt in mounds and ridges all the sea

Drove like a cataract, and all the sand

Swept like a river.

The Holy Grail.

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Locksley Hall.

Those who have walked on the Lido near Venice, when a tempest was blowing, know what Tennyson meant by the sweeping river of the sand. The dry grains stream past in a continuous cloud, as thick as torrent rain. Another time he sees a different effect of wind over wet sand:

Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand
Torn from the fringe of spray.

He hears "the shingle grinding in the surge," and "the scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave"; but sees, with equal truth, the soft upcoming of the peaceful swell on the smooth, flat sand-" dappled dimplings of the wave"; or

the crisping ripples on the beach And tender curving lines of creamy spray.

Or with the sad creatures in Despair, waits

Till the points of the foam in the dusk came playing about our feet.

He looks on a nobler, larger aspect of the waters outspreading over distant, shallow sands-when from "the lazy-plunging sea"

the great waters break

Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud.

Or, once more, he lies on the shore to watch

the curl'd white of the coming wave

Glass'd in the slippery sand before it breaks.

He has seen with no

less force the wave breaking on

the cliffs, and heard its

roar with a no less attentive ear.

Into the cove at Tintagil comes a ninth wave, which,

gathering half the deep

And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged

Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame.

And the fringe

Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand
Lash'd at the wizard as he spake the word,

And all at once all round him rose in fire.

This splendid piece of phosphoric sea is matched by the tidal-wave in Sea Dreams scaling the cliffs and exploding in the caves. When a wave fills a cave the compressed air bursts out like a clap of thunder:

But while the two were sleeping, a full tide

Rose with ground-swell, which, on the foremost rocks
Touching, upjetted in spirts of wild sea-smoke,

And scaled in sheets of wasteful foam, and fell

In vast sea-cataracts-ever and anon

Dead claps of thunder from within the cliffs
Heard thro' the living roar.

A similar thunder is recorded in the Palace of Art, where

the billows

roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves

Beneath the windy wall.

Then he describes not only the noise, but the still advance of the windless swell into and through the cavern:

As on a dull day in an ocean cave

The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall

In silence.

He does not often speak of the great calm. There are the tropic lines in Maud:

Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea,
The silent, sapphire-spangled, marriage-ring of the land.

There is that passage in Enoch Arden when the Pacific lies outspread and blazing in the sun, but even that is made alive by

The league-long roller thundering on the reef.

There are the lines in the Princess, where the Prince sees in vision

A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight, swell
On some dark shore just seen that it was rich.

This is the only calm sea-moonlight I remember in the poems. That lovely metaphor in Maud,

If a hand as white

As ocean-foam in the moon,

borders upon storm; and so does the only other moonlighted sea I can recall—a very jewel of truth and imagination :

A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.

And once at least we see in a lovely verse of the poem to F. D. Maurice, the Channel and the ships:

Where, if below the milky steep

Some ship of battle slowly creep,

And on thro' zones of light and shadow
Glimmer away to the lonely deep.

One other sea-piece, amid all these collected aspects of observant truth, I myself saw realised. I used to think that the phrase "wrinkled sea," in the fragment called The Eagle, was too bold. But one day I stood on the edge of the cliff below Slieve League in Donegal. The cliff from which I looked down on the Atlantic was nine hundred feet in height. Besides me the giant slope of Slieve League plunged down from its summit for more than eighteen hundred feet. As I gazed down on the sea below which was calm in the shelter, for the wind blew off the land, the varying puffs that eddied in and out among the hollows and juttings of the cliffs covered the quiet surface with an infinite network of involved ripples. It was exactly Tennyson's wrinkled sea. Then, by huge good fortune, an eagle which built on one of the ledges of Slieve League, flew out of his eyrie and poised, barking, on his wings; but in a moment fell precipitate, as their manner is, straight down a thousand feet to the sea. And I could not help crying

out:

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

A

YLMER'S FIELD seems from one point of

view to have been written as a contrast to Enoch Arden. Enoch Arden was a tale of humble life

and of a fisherman's self-sacrifice. Aylmer's Field is a tale of a life on a higher social level, and of the other than self-sacrifices hag-ridden persons in it sometimes make. Enoch sacrificed himself for the sake of those he loved. Sir Aylmer sacrificed his daughter and his friend for the sake of his sickly pride. Enoch dies, Sir Aylmer dies, but the one leaves tenderness and happiness behind him and the other bitterness and desolation. The law of Love with its sanctions is embodied in these two quiet tales; is gathered round simple circumstances, and is woven in and out with common human passions made mean or exalted in various characters. The stories are set in carefully painted scenery, and are lit and warmed by a steadily burning fire of imagination.

But though this doctrine of love arises from both