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words, of which no one before, except Milton, was so skilled, so conscious, or so continuous a master. whole essay might be written on this part of his technic art; and it is worth a reader's while, for once at least, to collect together these great vowel-passages from his poems.

The Recollections of the Arabian Nights is another of these landscape poems. Every verse is a picture of a new reach of the river Tigris; the sound of every word is studied in them, so that the words in their varied sound should do the same office for the poetry that the various tones of colour do for a painting. And to accomplish this the better, he now invented, but far too much and with a luxuriance which he afterwards pruned away, a number of double adjectives, chosen as much for their sound as for their images. All the poems about women filled with these-sudden-curved, golden-netted, forward-flowing, silver-chiming, fountainfragrant, shadow-chequered, hollow-vaulted, sable-sheeny -and very many more: a dangerous trick to gain, and one from which it is difficult to escape. Tennyson loved these double-shotted words, but he had power enough afterwards to bring their use into moderation.

There is another poem, The Sea Fairies, not much in itself, but also prophetic of a new world in poetry. The first three lines in the song of the Sirens is the first true note of the singing quality, both in metre and in unity of theme, which afterwards made the songs of Tennyson so distinguished. The other songs in this

book might have been written by half a dozen other men-they belong to the merely graceful-but this is his own, and its quality is altogether of a new kind. begins :

It

Whither away, whither away, whither away? Fly no more:
Whither away with the swinging sail? whither away with the oar?
Whither away from the high green field and the happy blossoming
shore?

This is the easy movement of a metrist's wing in an early flight, singing all the time. I say an early flight, for his metrical movement, as most of the poems in this book declare, was at this time broken, halting, and unmusical. Coleridge said, when he read these poems, that Tennyson had "begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is"; and indeed he arrived at the excellence he did attain in metre more by study than by natural gift. But the capability of fine artistic song is as clearly shadowed forth in The Sea Fairies, as the full sunlight is by the colours of the dawn. What it was to become, after some years of training, any one may read in the song in The LotosEaters, of which this poem is, as it were, the first sketch. Moreover, there is another characteristic of Tenny

son's future poetry in The Sea Fairies.

It is the first of

the small classical studies in which he excelled, and it is built on the same foundation as the rest of them. When he takes a classical subject he builds it up with one underlying thought which, running through the whole of

the poem, gives it unity. He chooses a simple thought, common to all mankind; felt by the ancients, but to which he gives continual touches and variations which grow out of modern life, and out of his own soul. This is the case with Ulysses, Enone, Tithonus, and the rest. But the unity and simplicity of the thought, its mingled ancient and modern air, and its careful inweaving into the whole body of the story, make these classical things of his unique. No one has ever done them in the same fashion, and the fashion is extraordinarily interesting.

In The Sea Fairies the thought is the weariness of the ceaseless labour of the world. "Why toil so much for so little? Take the joy of rest and love. Sleep, before the great sleep." We shall see how this excessively simple thought is splendidly wrought out in The LotosEaters. It is enough now to say that this is the first of these classical poems, and, so far as method is concerned, it is similar to them all. This, then, is also a new thing.

Once more, on this poem, we have in it and The Mystic the first clear sound of the blank verse of Tennyson. These lines from The Mystic belong to him:

He, often lying broad awake, and yet

Remaining in the body, and apart

In intellect and power and will, hath heard
Time flowing in the middle of the night,
And all things creeping to a day of doom.

Still more prophetic of a new blank verse are the lines

at the beginning of The Sea Fairies:

Slow sail'd the weary mariners and saw,

Between the green brink and the running foam,
White limbs unrobèd in a crystal air,

Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest
To little harps of gold; and, while they mused,
Whispering to each other half in fear,

Shrill music reach'd them on the middle sea.

No one, with an ear, can mistake the novelty of the verse. It is plainly done by one who had read Milton, but it is not Milton's way; it is Tennyson's own; and it is charming to hear the first note of a music which has delighted us so long in two lines like these:

Slow sailed the weary mariners, and saw

Between the green brink and the running foam.

These, then, are the new things in the poems of 1830. It remains to speak of his conception of what a poet was, and of himself as poet.

I have said that Tennyson was conscious all his life of being set apart as a prophet, and of the duties which he owed to humanity. His life, in his own mind, was weighted with a sense of these duties. He would have quoted for himself that noble passage in which Milton pictures himself and realises what sort of character the lofty poet must possess. He would have felt with that equally noble passage in The Prelude, where Wordsworth describes himself as consecrated to his work by Nature and by God. And it marks that change in the temper of England of which I wrote at the beginning, that Tennyson could not conceive, like Keats, of his work as done for beauty's sake alone, but also for the sake of

humankind. The new earnestness and excitement of the world compelled him to conceive of his work with the same intensity as Wordsworth when, writing under the enrapturing and fresh enthusiasm of humanity and buoyant with youthful vigour, he came at first to GrasWordsworth paints his soul, its outlook and its energy, in undying lines at the end of The Recluse; and the comparison of these (which I commend to my readers) with Tennyson's verses on The Poet is full of delightful interest.

mere.

In that poem, Tennyson lays down, and out of his own inward experience, what he conceived himself to be, and how he conceived his work; and he never abandoned, betrayed, or enfeebled his conception. It is a remarkable utterance for so young a man, weighty with that steadiness of temper which, if it diminished spontaneity in his art, yet gave it a lasting power.

The poet in a golden clime was born,

With golden stars above;

Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,

The love of love.

That is the beginning, and the first needs of the poet's nature could scarcely be better expressed. Then he speaks of the clear insight into God and man which is the best gift of the poet.

He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill,

He saw thro' his own soul.

The marvel of the everlasting will,

An open scroll,

Before him lay.