ALFRED TENNYSON is an English clergy- thoughts, investing them with life and man's son. He was born in Lincolnshire, motion, but which loses its personality in was taught Greek and "the humanities' at the multiplicity of forms which it assumes. Trinity College, Cambridge, imbibed a spe- There are no distinctive marks of a woolcies of poetic mysticism from Shelley, comber, or a poacher, or a second-rate learned metaphysics and simplicity of diction player, or a punch-quaffing wit, that could from Wordsworth, and studied poetry from make the shafts of raillery flash round the nature. There is little known of Tennyson brow of jolly Ben like the lightnings of personally. All that can be said of him Jove round the brow of old Titan. There individually might be written upon his is nothing of Shakspeare's self, but the tombstone, and his epitaph would neither philosophy of human nature, which belongs be redundant nor very particular. He is more or less to all men as well as to him, in said to be of a retiring, reflective disposi- all he says or sings, so that it is not to his tion, and this is almost the only character- writings that man will go for a history of istic of the man that you could discover his habits. It is not in Tennyson's poems through the medium of his poetry; for you that men will discover the great lineaments might as well seek to discover the peculiar of his nature. It is true that the individumood and chief mode of Shakspeare's spirit al human soul may be said to have no parin his plays as Tennyson's in his two little ticular aspect, that even in its successive volumes. The one is an impersonality, an passions and moods there is a seeming but abstraction, with no material form, but no real identity; still there is an individusoul enough to supply a legion of inferior ality of mind when in repose a uniformity beings to himself with vitality, sensation, in its periods of rest which all men believe and thought; his creations tremble on the they can perceive, and even this Tennyverge of his own spirituality, and graduate son's mind-mirror fails to show us. Tennydown from a Prospero to a Caliban. You son is a poet, even a great poet, although feel Shakspeare in his dramas, you know his productions are not numerous, and these him to be superior to all you read, or all productions cannot be said to be popular. that even his electric thoughts, clothed in If present popularity is the only safe pre radiant words, can suggest, but you can- sage of future glory, then Alfred may not not see him; he is too subtle to be grasped anticipate the brightening of his star in the like a palpable essence; he is too spiritual horizon of posterity; but if even the to be seen; he is the soul that permeates "prince of critics" is fallible, and the prethrough and vivifies the modifications of his cedent of Wordsworth is a reed worth the VOL. XIII. No. III.

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leaning on in faith, then he may without mignonette," and listening to the prattle presumption hope to emerge from the dim, of a pretty youth regarding the charms of indefinite, abysmal region where flickers the a pretty girl; in the next your eyes are nebulæ of neglected or ostracized genius fixed on the broad expanse of a wild dreary into a bright place in the galaxy of fame. world, with a dull unbroken sterility before Indeed, the sphere of Tennyson's influence you, where you can see

is already steadily widening, and men are seeking to know more of him, so it is likely that in this age of calm revision and correc

"Far as the wild swan wings, to where the sky Dipt down to sea and sands."

behold

"The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, With shadow streaks of rain,"

"And one, an English home-grey twilight pour'd
On dewy pastures, dewy trees
Softer than sleep-all things in order stored-
A haunt of ancient peace,"

tion-in this period of examination and As you gaze with this magician upon this amendment of extreme opinions and sen- dull, ideal region of his darker mood, and tences, passed by a proximate but now decayed censorship, he may assume his true position at the poetical roundtable. His literary career has been a counterpart of his own-quiet and unassuming as regards the author, but, like his own passion-paint- you imbibe a dreamy sense of agony from ing, as relates to the world of criticism, the earnestness of his temper; your heart torn and fondled between extremes. grows cold as you look through the dim and In 1831, his first offering was laid upon and nightmare seems to ride upon your lurid vista which he opens to your vision, the altar of his country's poetic genius; and while it was savagely mangled by some strangled sleep as his intense, too real landof the fierce tribunes of the republic of scape hangs like a changeless circumstance letters as a rescript of the puerilities and upon your eyes. When you are attempting absurdities of a presumptuous, would-be- to rouse yourself to wrestle with the power, mystical boy-dreamer, others exalted it to however, that raised this dismal picture in a high place in their veneration. To his the phantasmagoria of your soul, behold he first volume succeeded a second, not larger changes the scene ~ in dimensions than its predecessor, and possessing less of the properties of style and thought. This production, even the small but zealous coteries of Tennyson's admirers were forced to admit, exhibited less poetic excellence than his first; and the rises, like a dream of the spirit-land, before revision and weeding of his two books for a your enraptured sense of inward sight. You third edition, in 1843, showed that the poet roam in restless wonder with this mighty himself acquiesced in the decision of his painter, who combines the distinctive palfriends. It is to be lamented that in this pable power of individualizing and groupcensorship over himself, however, he was ing possessed by Raphael, the grandeur of too severe, as he expelled with the huge M. Angelo, and the richness of Titian's "krakens" of his distempered fancy the mild vehicle, together with the softness of Claude, and lovely" syrens" of his better dreams-through all gradations and changes of an indiscriminateness of expulsion which nature's aspects. You are with him in the his admirers regret and his friends condemn. soft twilight-haunted chambers of his Tennyson we conceive to be excellent in father's parsonage, or you are scanning with all the forms of poetry-in the descriptive, the wonder of Vathek the thousandenthusiastic, dramatic, and reflective. His throned hall of Eblis, and he is at home verse is generally as soft and mellifluous as in them all. In richness and profusion of the sweet-singing waters of Paradise; it is metaphor, in a full luxuriant amplitude of a form of song with heart-chords that can descriptive imagery, perhaps Coleridge thrill in the wild delirium of passion, trem- alone surpassed him, as he hardly excels ble amidst the doubts and fears of a morbid, him even in the soft musical cadence of his half-misanthropic scepticism, or enunciate numbers. Tennyson has been a poet since strains of gentlest love. In description he his earliest years; he has fed since earliest ranges from an extreme minuteness and boyhood upon all the phenomena of nature precision that may appear finical and feeble, that observation could lay before his ken, to a grandeur and power that inspire the and he has revolved all the images and aslistener with awe. You are at one moment pects of things in his ideality, fancy, and looking with him into a "long green box of reason, until he has made them parts of

himself; there is a confident abandonment dream of Paradise as does Alfred Tennyin his fancy that takes captive the spirit of son, or people it with such a houri as she his auditor, and reduces it to his own mood, but let the poet describe her: it were when he gets abroad to the wold or valley. almost profanation for other to attempt You feel that every blade of grass and itevery flower is known to him, and that the voices of the winds, and trees, and purling brooks, and sobbing streams, are all familiar to his ear as the laugh of the "airy fairy Lilian."

Critics have been almost universally agreed upon the surpassing beauty of his "Recollections of the Arabian Nights." They are indeed a poetic dream of beauty, whose elements, like ore of gold, have lain refining in the crucible of a soul familiar with beauty's quintessence, until they have resolved themselves into the symmetry, consistency, and melody of an almost perfect poem. It was

"When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free In the silken sail of infancy,"

"Then stole I up, and trancedly
Gazed on the Persian girl alone,
Serene with argent-lidded eyes
Amorous, and lashes like to rays
Of darkness, and a brow of pearl
Tress'd with redolent ebony,
In many a dark delicious curl,
Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone;
The sweetest lady of the time,
Well worthy of the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid."

Tennyson's ideal of woman is almost Shakspearian. It is a chaste and ethereal conception, such as we would suppose to germinate in the imagination of one who had a dim traditional idea of Milton's Eve in her conditions of purity and sin. His women are as beautiful as Byron's, with less of that the germ of this exquisite orient specdross about them. They are outlined with tacle implanted itself in his memory; and a free yet delicate pencil; you can perceive no sooner do we step into the shallop with the very bend of their soft feminine forms, him, which rides upon the fragrant, glisten- as, sitting amongst roses, lilies, and deliing deeps, over which hang the low and cate carnations, they turn their large swimbloomed foliage of the groves of his recol-ming eyes upon their worshipper, nor chide lections, than the "tide of time" flows back him that "he gazes too fondly on each Each of his women may be termed with us, and away we are borne again to an articulation in the anatomy of love; one the "sheeny summer morn" of youth, on which we used to sit enraptured amidst the gem-clad groves of Aladdin. The golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid rises like a galaxy of suns before our vision, and onward we float with the poet,

"By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold," High-walled gardens green and old,"

face."

might almost construct a complete economy of the passion, from its dawn to its death, by studying the Clarabels, Lilians, Marianas, Isabels, and Enones of his fancy, and observing the phenomena of the "consuming fire" in the spirits of each.

" Airy, fairy Lilian,

Flitting, fairy Lilian,

When I ask her if she loves me,
Claps her tiny hands above me,
Laughing all she can;

She'll not tell me if she love me,
Cruel, little Lilian."

cleaving with the prow of the shallop, which sparkles like a thousand prisms, with colors as bright as the plumes of the peacock, "the citron shadows in the blue;" we pass with a whirl through folded doors flung open for our admission; we bathe ourselves Portia does not more distinctly draw her in the rays of the gold-reflected light that own portrait, and at the same time give us falls with a dim, luxurious, mellow radiance an insight into her mind, where woman's on the broidered sofas that ranged on either wit and woman's tenderness combine, when side along the walls of that gorgeous palace she declares," My little body is aweary of whose grandeur was only fit for, and com- this great world," than does Tennyson in mensurate with, the "goodly time," the these few glowing words, cut out from the golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid. elements that store the studio of his imagiNever did Mussulman, amidst the luxury nation, a palpable, rosy-cheeked, beautiful, and languor of the harem of harems, and "airy fairy" girl. You see her little feet, surrounded by all the attributes of the that scarce could crush the rose, and from East-with eastern odors, and sunshine, the pressure of which the resilient daisy and magic, and beauty-dream such a would raise its dew-crowned head and smile