Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence. Through the thick night I hear the trumpet blow: They summon me, their king, to lead mine hosts Far down to that great battle in the west, Where I must strike against my sister's son, Leagued with the Lord of the White Horse, and knights And thou, remaining here, wilt learn the event; Never lie by thy side, see thee no more. And while she grovelled at his feet He departs. She watches him from the window as he mounts, his dragon-crest gleaming in the mist; and with a face "which then was as an angel's," enjoins the nuns "to guard and foster her for evermore." himself "become as mist When he had Before her, moving ghost-like to his doom," then she bursts out in a passionate apostrophe of that profound penitence, from which the air of nobleness will not depart, and of recalled and revived affection. As the nuns gather round, her strain rises higher still. But we must digress for a moment. 46. Mr. Tennyson practises largely, and with an extraordinary skill and power, the art of designed and limited repetitions. They bear a considerable resemblance to those Homeric formula which had been so usefully remarked by Colonel Mure; not the formulæ of constant recurrence, which tell us who spoke and who answered, but those which are connected with pointing moral effects, and with ulterior purpose. These repetitions tend at once to give more definite impressions of character, and to make firmer and closer the whole tissue of the poem. Thus, in the last speech of Guinevere, she echoes back, with other ideas and expressions, the sentiment of Arthur's affection, which becomes in her mouth sublime : "I must not scorn myself: he loves me still: She prays admission among the nuns, in order that she may follow the pious and peaceful tenor of their life (p. 260): "And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer And it is but a debt of justice to the Guinevere of the romancers to observe, that she loses considerably by the marked transposition which Mr. Tennyson has effected in the order of greatness between Lancelot and Arthur. With him there is an original error in her estimate, independently of the breach of a positive and sacred obligation. She prefers the inferior man; and this preference of itself implies some ethical defect rooted in her nature. In the romance of Sir T. Mallory, the preference she gives to Lancelot would have been signally just, had she been free to choose. For Lancelot is of an indescribable grandeur; but the limit of Arthur's character is thus shown in certain words that he uses, and that Lancelot never could have spoken: "Much more I am sorrier for my good knight's loss than for the loss of my queen! for queens might I have enough, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company." 47. We began with the exordium of this great work: we must not withhold the conclusion. We left her praying admission to the convent : "She said. They took her to themselves; and she, Dwelt with them, till in time their Abbess died. And likewise for the high rank she had borne, Was chosen Abbess: there, an Abbess, lived For three brief years; and there, an Abbess, pass'd No one, we are persuaded, can read this poem without feeling, when it ends, what may be termed the pangs of vacancy; of that void in heart and mind for want of its continuance, of which we are conscious when some noble strain of music ceases, when some great work of Raphael passes from the view, when we lose sight of some spot connected with high associations, or when some transcendent character upon the page of history finally disappears, and the withdrawal of it is like the withdrawal of the vital air. We have followed the Guinevere of Mr. Tennyson through its detail, and have extracted largely from its pages, and yet have not a hope of having conveyed an idea of what it really is; still we have thought that in this way we should do it the least injustice; and we are also convinced that even what we have shown will tend to rouse an appetite, and that any of our readers, who may not yet have been also Mr. Tennyson's, will become more eager to learn and admire it at first hand. 48. We have no doubt that Mr. Tennyson has carefully considered how far his subject is capable of fulfilling the conditions of an epic structure. The history of Arthur is not an epic as it stands, but neither was the Cyclic song, of which the greatest of all epics, the Iliad, handles a part. The poem of Ariosto is scarcely an epic, nor is that of Bojardo; but is not this because each is too promiscuous and crowded in its brilliant phantasmagoria to conform to the severe laws of that lofty and inexorable class of poem? Though the Arthurian romance be no epic, it does not follow that no epic can be made from out of it. It is grounded in certain leading characters, men and women, conceived upon models of extraordinary grandeur; and as the Laureate has evidently grasped the genuine law which makes man, and not the mere acts of man, the base of epic song, we should not be surprised were he hereafter to realise the great achievement towards which he seems to be feeling his way. There is a moral unity and a living relationship between the four poems before us, and the first effort of 1842 as a fifth, which, though some considerable part of their contents would necessarily rank as episode, establishes the first and most essential condition of their cohesion. The achievement of Vivien bears directly on the state of Arthur by withdrawing his chief councillor -the brain, as Lancelot was the right arm, of his court; the love of Elaine is directly associated with the final catastrophe of the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere. Enid lies somewhat further off the path. Nor is it for profane feet to intrude into the sanctuary, for reviewers to advise poets in these high matters; but while we presume nothing, we do not despair of seeing Mr. Tennyson achieve, on the basis he has chosen, the structure of a full-formed epic. 49. In any case we have a cheerful hope that, if he continues to advance upon himself as he has advanced heretofore, nay, if he can keep the level he has gained in Guinevere, such a work will be the greatest, and by far the greatest poetical creation, that, whether in our own or in foreign poetry, the nineteenth century has produced. In the face of all critics, the Laureate of England has now reached a position which at once imposes and instils respect. They are self-constituted; but he has won his way through the long dedication of his manful energies, accepted and crowned by deliberate, and, we rejoice to think, by continually growing, public favour. He has after all, and it is not the least nor lowest item in his praise, been the severest of his own critics; and has not been too proud either to learn or to unlearn in the work of maturing his genius, and building up his fame. 50. From his very first appearance he has had the form and fashion of a true poet: the delicate insight into beauty, the refined perception of harmony, the faculty of suggestion, the eye both in the physical and moral world. for motion, light, and colour, the sympathetic and close observation of nature, the dominance of the constructive faculty, and that rare gift the thorough mastery and loving use of his native tongue. Many of us, the common crowd, made of the common clay, may be lovers of Nature. A few may be as sincere or even as ardent as Mr. Tennyson. But it does not follow that even these favoured ones possess the privilege that he enjoys. To them she speaks through vague and indeterminate impressions: for him she has a voice of the most finished articulation; all her images to him are clear and definite, and he translates |