child, she implores heaven for her, she wanders over all lands to find her, she forgets her own Earth; but the loveliest thing she does-and it is imagined with infinite tenderness-is to console all the troubled mothers of the world. She gives to failing children the same breast which nurtured Persephone Thy breast to wailing infants in the night. The Death of Enone, the last of these poems, recalls the earliest of them, and the landscape is much the same, only as it is winter in Enone's heart, it is now winter by the cave and in the glade, where formerly, at the coming of the goddesses, the greensward of spring burst into fire. And Paris comes to see her as of old, but now Lame, crooked, reeling, livid, thro' the mist, to beg her to heal him of his grievous wound. She refuses; a woman after ten years of brooding wrath and pain was not likely to forgive. He passes away into the mist, dies, and is burnt on a pyre by the shepherds. She flings herself on the pyre. I do not know the date of this poem-there can never be any proper study of Tennyson until all these late-published poems are accurately datedbut it is quite plain that the mind which grasped Ulysses, Lucretius, or even Tiresias, has here lost much of its power. It is well put together as a little tale; but the subject is not seized by the right handles. I cannot guess to what idea or emotion in Tennyson's mind the story has been sacrificed, but it is sacrificed. It is too improbable that Paris should walk up Ida to call for Enone, considering where and how he was wounded; or stagger down the hill from her. If the art of the piece were made better by this change in the tale, this criticism would be nought; but it is not made better, and the improbability is impossibility. Nor do I understand the husband and wife and widow business, unless it be that Tennyson desired to express over again his devotion to the eternity and sanctity of the marriage relation. This is wholly out of place in the story. The union between Paris and the nymph Enone was not a marriage nor anything that resembled it. When we come to Her husband in the flush of youth and dawn, we do not know where we are. We are certainly not on Ida. When we hear Enone's answer to the cry of Paris for help, we are in the midst, not of the light unions between Greek mortals and the nymphs, but of the social moralities of England. Adulterer, Go back to thine adulteress and die! This is not credible on the lips of Enone. Still more strange is that which follows, still more dis tant from Greek thought. nymph, dreams that Paris other world to come to him, unfaithfulness: Enone, the mountain calls to her from the and has repented his Come to me, Enone! I can wrong thee now no more, Enone, my Enone. Christian, it maybe, but not Greek; and, still more, not possible for a nymph to dream. And the end is equally out of the question. It is a pretty thought in itself, and might well belong to a mortal woman, even to an Oriental pagan, but it does not belong to a mountain nymph of the Greek imagination who never dreamt of marriage and would have smiled at any union of the kind : And all at once The morning light of happy marriage broke CHAPTER V THE PRINCESS The IN MEMORIAM is the most complete, most rounded to a polished sphere, of the larger poems of Tennyson; the Idylls of the King, is the most ambitious; Maud is the loveliest, most rememberable; and The Princess is the most delightful. Holiday-hearted, amazingly varied, charming our leisured ease from page to page, it is a poem to read on a sunny day in one of those rare places in the world where "there is no clock in the forest," where the weight and worry of the past, the present, or the future, do not make us conscious of their care. There is no sorrow or sense of the sorrow of the world in it. man who wrote it had reached maturity, but there is none of the heaviness of maturity in its light movement. It is really gay, as young as the Prince himself who is its hero; and the dreams and desires of youth flit and linger in it as summer bees around the honied flowers. A great charm is thus given to the poem. We feel for it the affection which is bestowed on youthfulness by those who have passed by youthfulness, that half-regret, half-tenderness, and sweet memory in both, the sadness of which is not too much, and the pleasure of which is not too little. Mingled with the youthfulness in the poem is the serious thought of manhood. There is enough of gravity to dignify the subject-matter, and enough of play to take dulness out of the gravity. The poem is like the gray statue of Sir Ralph robed with Lilia's orange scarf and rosy silk. Of course, this twofold element adds to that variety which stirs new pleasure and new thinking from page to page. But beyond that, the scheme of the poem enabled Tennyson to invent all kinds of fantastic events that follow one another as thickly as they do in a romantic tale; and he is up to the level of the invention required. One scarcely expects him to do this with ease. Inventiveness of incident lags somewhat in Tennyson's work. The invention of the greater number of the episodes in the Idylls of the King is excellent. The invention of the events which carry on the story is not so good, and it is certainly not opulent. Moreover, we see in the dramas how slow-moving his inventiveness is; their movement continually drags from the want of that which the dramatists call business. Here, however, the story runs along with a lively variety both of characters and events glancing and charming through it. This variety is still more increased by the mingling of ancient and modern in the poemmodern science jostling with ancient manners, modern dress with ancient arms, girls' colleges with tournaments; the woman-question of to-day with the woman-ideal of the days of chivalry; Joan of Arc with the Cambridge girl; and rising out of both-out of the old and the new-first, Tennyson's own view of womanhood, and secondly, that which |