to restore sanity to the individual, and manliness to the nation; as he says himself (xxviii.): "It lighten'd my despair When I thought that a war would arise in defence of the right, That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease, The story of Maud may be given in briefest outline. The hero has been bereaved of his father by a sudden and mysterious death, which may have been suicide or may have been foul play; his mother slowly fades away after her husband's loss, and leaves him poor and solitary. The "new man," the millionaire who had made his fortune on the ruins of theirs, comes back to the freshly-decorated Hall. He has a son and a daughter; the son is vulgar, churlish, and odious, the daughter is full of beauty and charm. The hero, despite all his resolutions to the contrary, falls in love with Maud, his old playmate, who, as he afterwards discovers, had been betrothed to him in youth. To this portion of the work belong some most exquisite snatches of poetry. Meanwhile Maud has another admirer, a “babe-faced lord," whose suit is favoured by her father and brother, whereas her affection is bestowed on the hero, whom she meets in the wood and to whom she plights her troth. After a ball at her father's house, she gives her lover a rendezvous in the garden ("Come into the garden, Maud "). Unfortunately the brother discovers the tryst-there is a duel between him and the hero, and he is left for dead, while the hero takes refuge in Brittany and goes mad. Apparently at this point he receives the news of Maud's death, and we are not surprised afterwards to find him in an asylum. Eventually, however, he recovers- -his recovery being largely due to the proclamation of a war with Russia and to the new direction thus given to his thoughts. If the reader thinks there is something a little inadequate about the plot of Maud thus barely sketched, we fear we cannot differ from him. Tennyson's forte was not the construction of a plot, nor had he the power, which Shakespeare so wonderfully shows in Romeo and Juliet, of filling it out with lifelike character sketches. But as a lyrical poet he has given us in Maud some most musical songs and stanzas and unforgettable single lines, which will be commented on in their proper place -nor has he often been more successful as a painter in words than in some of the dashes of bright colour with which he has relieved the sombre outlines of this poem. Again, the beautiful lines (xxiv.) on the tiny shell on the coast of Brittany are in his very best manner. The whole volume of which Maud forms the principal part is perhaps—with the exception of the beautiful idyll The Brook, which is in the poet's earlier and most delightful style—a little too rhetorical. There are too many tricks of alliteration, metre, and sound; there is too much of what in horses would be called high action. This is, we think, particularly the case in the fine Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, containing as it does much that the nation will not willingly let die, blent with some passages which are little better than mere noise. On the other hand, the poem of The Brook, already referred to, is a pure delight. The reader hardly knows why he likes it so much, it has all the refreshing charm of sunshine and freshness, of youth and country life; the fascinating babble of the brook heard at intervals through the human conversation is one of Tennyson's happiest inspirations, and may be compared with a somewhat similar poem, "Thus the Mayne glideth -the lay of Festus in Browning's Paracelsussimilar in one sense, but yet very unlike, and illustrating the very dissimilar mind of the great poet who wrote it in contrast with that of Tennyson, whom he warmly admired. The Charge of the Light Brigade, rapidly thrown off, we are told, after the perusal of the day's newspaper, in which the expression "Some one had blundered" occurred, became instantly, and has always remained, one of Tennyson's most popular poems. Leaflets of it were struck off and sent to the troops, and a touching story is told of one wounded man whose recovery was apparently so much accelerated by having the poem read to him, that on giving him his discharge-card, the medical man murmured, "Well done, Tennyson!" |