Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Was it a vision, or a waking dream? LESSON 65. TENNYSON." Keats marks the exhaustion of the impulse which began with Burns and Cowper. There was no longer now in England any large wave of public thought or feeling such as could awaken poetry. But with the Reform agitation, and the new religious agitation at Oxford, which was of the same date, a new excitement or a new form of the old, came on England, and with it a new tribe of poets arose, among whom we live. The elements of their poetry were also new, though their germs were sown in the previous poetry. It took up the theological, sceptical, social, and political questions which disturbed England. It gave itself to metaphysics and to analysis of human character. It carried the love of natural scenery into almost every county in England, aud described the whole land. Some of its best writers are ROBERT BROWNING, MRS. BROWNING, MATTHEW ARNOLD, and A. H. CLOUGH. One of them, ALFRED TENNYSON, has for forty years remained the first. All the great subjects of his time he has touched poetically, and enlightened. His feeling for Nature is accurate, loving, and of a wide range. His human sympathy fills as wide a field. The large interests of mankind and of his own time, the lives of simple people, and the subtler phases of thought and feeling which arise in our overwrought society are wisely and tenderly written of in his poems. His drawing of distinct human characters is the best we have in pure poetry since Chaucer wrote. He writes true songs, and he has excelled all English writers in the pure Idyll. The Idylls of the King are a kind of epic, and he has lately tried the drama. In lyrical measures, as in the form of his blank verse, he is as inventive as original. It is by the breadth of his range that he most conclusively takes the first place among the modern poets." "If I may take my own experience as an indication of the nature of Tennyson's influence generally, I should say that he is pre-eminently distinguished by the quality of charm. The element of sweetness pervades his poetry; sweetness too subtle to define, sweetness never permit ted to cloy the reader, sweetness cunningly allied with, or relieved by, what the poet calls 'the bitter of the sweet.' I accept the ancient canon of criticism that poetry ought to be not only beautiful but sweet, and I think that it is in the exceeding beauty of Tennyson's that one chief secret of its sweetness lies. Not only do these poems display no vulgar smartness but no fun, no humor, no caricature. A Greek severity of style is everywhere apparent; a reverence as of one for whom song has in very truth the sacredness of worship. And even if we decide that in the work of Tennyson as a whole there is too much of rule and measure, too marked an absence of humor, too little of the wild witching graces of freedom, we are, I think, safe in regarding the classic purity, the chastened enthusiasm-in one word, the moderation, of his first poems as a good omen. The earnestness noted by Hallam was the best proof of capacity to take pains, the best guarantee of staying power. To describe his command of language by any ordinary terms expressive of fluency or force would be to convey an idea both inadequate and erroneous. It is not only that he knows every word in the language suited to express his every idea; he can select with the ease of magic the word that above all others is best for his purpose: nor is it that he can at once summon to his aid the best word the language affords; with an art which Shakespeare never scrupled to apply, though in our day it is apt to be counted mere Germanism, and pronounced contrary to the genius of the language, he combines old words into new epithets, he daringly mingles all colors to bring out tints that never were on sea or shore. His words gleam like pearls and opals, like rubies and emeralds. He yokes the stern vocables of the English tongue to the chariot of his imagination, and they become gracefully brilliant as the leopards of Bacchus, soft and glowing as the Cytherean doves. He must have been born with an ear for verbal sounds, an instinctive appreciation of the beautiful and delicate in words, hardly ever equalled. Though his later works speak less of the blossom-time-show less of the efflorescence and iridescence, and mere glance and gleam of colored words-they display no falling off, but rather an advance, in the mightier elements of rhythmic speech."-Peter Bayne. BIBLIOGRAPHY. TENNYSON.-P. Bayne's Lessons from my Masters; Bromley's Essays; Stedman's Victorian Poets; Taine's Hist. Eng. Lit.; J. Sterling's Essays and Tales; Howitt's Homes and Haunts of Brit. Poets; Black. Mag, v. 79, 1856; 88, 1860; and 96, 1864; Fras. Mag., v. 52, 1855; 53, 1856; and 60, 1859; N. Br. Rev., v. 31, 1849; 41, 1864; and 53, 1871; Ed. Rev., vs. 102 and 131; Quar. Rev., v. 106, 1859; 119, 1866; 128, 1870; and 131, 1871; West. Rev., v. 72, 1859; and 82, 1864; Nat. Quar. Rev., v. 5, 1862; and 19, 1869; Contem Rev., v. 7, 1867; New Englander, v 18, 1860; and 22, 1863. MRS. BROWNING.-Black. Mag., v. 81, 1857: and 87, 1860; Nat. Quar. Rev., v. 1, 1860; and 5, 1862; N. Br. Rev., v: 26, 1856; 36, 1862; and 51, 1870; N. A. Rev., v. 85 1857. MR. BROWNING.-Ed. Rev., v. 120, 1864; 130, 1869; and 135, 1872; Fort. Rev., v. 11, 1869; and 16, 1871; Macmillan, Jan. and Apr., 1869; Contem. Rev., Jan. and Feb. 1867; and May, 1874; N. Br. Rev., v. 34, 1861; and 49, 1868. From Tennyson's Maud. Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad And the musk of the roses blown. For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves To faint in the light of the sun that she loves, All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d Till a silence fell with the waking bird, I said to the lily, "There is but one With whom she has heart to be gay. Low on the sand and loud on the stone I said to the rose, "The brief night goes O young lord-lover, what sighs are those But mine, but mine," so I sware to the rose, "For ever and ever, mine." And the soul of the rose went into my blood, As the music clash'd in the hall; And long by the garden lake I stood, For I heard your rivulet fall From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, Our wood, that is dearer than all; From the meadow your walks have left so sweet That, whenever a March-wind sighs, He sets the jewel-print of your feet In violets blue as your eyes, To the woody hollows in which we meet The slender acacia would not shake One long milk-bloom on the tree; The lilies and roses were all awake, They sigh'd for the dawn and thee. Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries,. "She is near, she is near;" The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;" And the lily whispers, I wait." She is coming, my own, my sweet; Had I lain for a century dead; 1 he Defence of Lucknow. Banner of England, not for a season, O banner of Britain, hast thou |