them for us into that language of suggestion, emphasis, and refined analogy, which links the manifold to the simple, and the infinite to the finite. He accomplishes for us what we should in vain attempt for ourselves, enables the puny hand to lay hold on what is vast, and brings even the common coarseness of grasp into a real contact with what is subtle and ethereal. His turn for metaphysical analysis is closely associated with a deep ethical insight: and many of his verses form sayings of so high a class that we trust they are destined to contribute a permanent part of the household-words of England.

51. Considering the quantity of power that Mr. Tennyson can make available, it is a great proof of self-discipline that he is not given to a wanton or tyrannous use of it. An extraordinary master of diction, he has confined himself to its severe and simple forms. In establishing this rule of practice, his natural gift has evidently been aided by the fine English of the old romances; and we might count upon the fingers the cases in which he has lately deviated into the employment of any ever so little stilted phrase, or given sanction to any word not of the best fabric. Profuse in the power of graphic† representation, he has chastened some of his earlier groups of imagery, which were occasionally overloaded with particulars; and in his later works, as has been well remarked, he has shown himself thoroughly aware that in poetry half is greater than the whole.

*

[I think that this sentence by no means does full justice to Mr. Tennyson's claims upon our gratitude as a guardian of the language.W. E. G., 1878.]

We use the word in what we conceive to be its only legitimate meaning; namely, after the manner and with the effect of painting. It signifies the quid, not the quale.

52. That the chastity of style he has attained is not from exhaustion of power may easily be shown. No poet has evinced a more despotic mastery over intractable materials, or has been more successful in clothing what is common with the dignity of his art. The Downs are not the best subjects in the world for verse; but they will be remembered with and by his descriptive line in the Idylls'—

"Far o'er the long backs of the bushless downs."

How becoming is the appearance of what we familiarly term the "clod" in the 'Princess'! (p. 37).

"Nor those horn-handed breakers of the glebe."

Of all imaginable subjects, mathematics might seem the most hopeless to make mention of in verse; but they are with him

"The hard-grained Muses of the cube and square."

Thus at a single stroke he gives us an image alike simple, true, and poetical to boot, because suited to its place and object in its verse; like the heavy Caryatides when well placed in architecture. After this we may less esteem the feat by which in 'Godiva' he describes the clock striking mid-day :

"All at once,

With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon
Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers."

But even the contents of a pigeon-pie are not beneath his notice, nor yet beyond his powers of embellishment, in 'Audley Court:'

"A pasty, costly made,

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks

Imbedded and injellied."

What excites more surprise is that he can, without any offence against good taste, venture to deal with these contents even after they have entered the mouth of the eater (Enid,' p. 79):

"The brawny spearman let his cheek

Bulge with the unswallowed piece, and turning, stared."

The delicate insight of fine taste appears to show him with wonderful precision up to what point his art can control and compel his materials; and from what point the materials are in hopeless rebellion, and must be let alone. So in the Princess' (p. 89) we are intoduced to—

"Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men,

Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain,
And labour."

It was absolutely necessary for him to heighten, nay, to coarsen, the description of these masses of animated beef, who formed the standing army of the womancommonwealth. Few would have obeyed this law without violating another law; but Mr. Tennyson saw that the verb was admissible, while the adjective would have been intolerable. There is a certain power of purging out vulgarity from ideas ordinarily tinged with it, which, as the readers of Homer and Dante know, is among the incommunicable prerogatives of genius.

53. In 1842, the severity of his eclectic process made it evident that he did not mean to allow any faults or weaknesses to stint the growth and mar the exhibition of his genius. When he published In Memoriam' in 1850, all readers were conscious of the progressive widening and strengthening, but, above all, deepening of his mind. We

cannot hesitate to mark the present volume as exhibiting another forward and upward stride, and that perhaps the greatest of all, in his career. If we are required to show cause for this opinion under any special head, we would at once point to that which is, after all, probably the first among the poet's gifts—the gift of conceiving and representing human character.

Our

54. Mr. Tennyson's Arthurian essays continually suggest to us comparisons not so much with any one poet as a whole, but rather with many or most of the highest poets. The music and the just and pure modulation of his verse carry us back not only to the fine ear of Shelley, but to Milton and to Shakespeare: and his powers of fancy and of expression have produced passages which if they are excelled by that one transcendent and ethereal poet of our nation whom we have last named, yet hardly could have been produced by any other English minstrel. author has a right to regard his own blank verse as highly characteristic and original: but yet Milton has contributed to its formation, and occasionally there is a striking resemblance in turn and diction, while Mr. Tennyson is the more idiomatic of the two. The chastity and moral elevation of this volume, its essential and profound though not didactic Christianity, are such as perhaps cannot be matched throughout the circle of English literature* in conjunction with an equal power; and such as even to recall a pattern which we know not whether Mr.

*

[At the date of this Review the 'Dream of Gerontius' by Dr. Newman had not been published. It appeared in 1865, without the Author's name, and in the unpretending form of a thin 32mo book or booklet. For this or some other unsatisfactory reason, it has never attained the renown it deserves. It was republished in 1868, in a volume which bore the initials J. H. N.-W. E. G., 1878.]

Tennyson has studied, the celestial strain of Dante.* This is the more remarkable, because he has had to tread upon ground which must have been slippery for any foot but his.

55. We are far from knowing that either Lancelot or Guinevere would have been safe even for mature readers, were it not for the instinctive purity of his mind, and the high skill of his management. We do know that in other times they have had their noble victims, whose names have become immortal as their own.

Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse."+

How difficult it is to sustain the elevation of such a subject, may be seen in the well-meant and long popular 'Jane Shore' of Rowe. How easily this very theme may be vulgarised, is shown in the Chevaliers de la Table Ronde' of M. Creuzé de Lesser, who nevertheless has aimed at a peculiar delicacy of treatment.

56. But the grand poetical quality, in which the new volume gives to its author a new rank and standing, is its dramatic power: the power of drawing character, and of representing action. These faculties have not been precocious in Mr. Tennyson: but what is more material, they have now come out in great force. He has always been fond of personal delineations, from Claribel and

*It is no reproach to say that neither Dante nor Homer could have been studied by Mr. Tennyson at the time (a very early period of his life) when he wrote the lines which are allotted to them respectively in The Palace of Art.'

t'Inferno,' c. V. v. 127.