passes into weakness. Fancy and reflection come in when the passion is over, and we are left a little disenchanted. I wish the last three verses were expunged. The other is a poem of much greater force, fully conceived, and sounding its way through deeper waters than we often try to fathom in Tennyson. Its motive, while uncommon,

is adequate to the emotion expressed.

Come not, when I am dead,

Here it is:

To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave,

To trample round my fallen head,

And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.
There let the wind sweep and the plover cry;
But thou, go by.

Child, if it were thine error or thy crime,
I care no longer, being all unblest;

Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time,
And I desire to rest.

Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie;
Go by, go by.

Weariness of love after long anger of love, weariness of life from weariness of love, and, beneath both, unforgetful tenderness, were rarely better expressed. But, to close these notes on the love poems in this volume, it is somewhat strange, but illustrative of what I have said about the dominance of the man in Tennyson, that the poem of fullest regret for love drowned in death is written in memory of a man. Every one knows it; it is a piece of perfect work, fully felt, and fully finished, simple and profoundand with what fine art Nature is inwoven with its passion!

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea,

And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

There is no need to quote the rest; it lives in the memory of man.

Along with these poems of love arose poems of modern life, half dramatic, half idyllic; dramatic idylls-some of a serious, even a stately simplicity, quite close to common human life, like Dora, which is a little masterpiece; others of a homespun humour mingled with imaginative thought, like Audley Court and The Golden Year; and others full of that honest University humour which characterises the talk of Englishmen when they are on a vacation tour, like Walking to the Mail and Edwin Morris. These are pure modernism; they also are new in English poetry; they have opened a vein which many others may work at, and they have opened it in an excellent and varied way. The very similes Tennyson uses in them are in harmony with the character of the poems, similes drawn from every-day sounds and sights, and so vital with observation of common English life and things that they seem to illuminate the page with England.

A body slight and round, and like a pear
In growing, modest eyes, a hand, a foot
Lessening in perfect cadence, and a skin
As clean and white as privet when it flowers.

James-you know him-old, but full
Of force and choler, and firm upon his feet,
And like an oaken stock in winter woods,
O'erflourish'd by the hoary clematis.

He laugh'd, and I, though sleepy, like a horse
That hears the corn-bin open, prick'd my ears.

Scattered through these poems, and in accordance with all I have said of Tennyson's incorporation of

Nature and the heart of man, are lovely, true, and intimate descriptions of Nature in England, done with an art which never forgot itself, and which seemed sometimes too elaborate in skill. Indeed, we should often feel this, were it not that the full product gives so complete a pleasure.

The Gardener's Daughter is alive with such de scriptions; and it would be worth while to read that of the entrance into the garden. Step by step, as we move on, the changing scene is painted. We walk through the landscape with Tennyson. This gardenpassage begins:

We reach'd a meadow slanting to the north.

When the last line strikes the ear,

The twinkling laurel scatter'd silver lights,

it is meant to paint the very thing by words; but a far finer instance of this, where the line is so arranged in sound as to be itself what he describes, is towards the end of the poem :

Or as once we met
Unheedful, tho' beneath a whispering rain
Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind,
And in her bosom bore the baby, Sleep.

Nor can I pass by that description of the Lincoln meadows, near the town, lush in thick grass and in broad waters, and deep in wind-washed trees—

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;

Although between it and the garden lies

A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream,
That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge
Crown'd with the minster-towers.

The fields between

Are dewy-fresh, browsed by deep-udder'd kine,
And all about the large lime feathers low,
The lime a summer home of murmurous wings.

The close of Audley Court is as near to truth :

The town was hush'd beneath us: lower down
The bay was oily-calm; the harbour buoy,
With one green sparkle ever and anon
Dipt by itself, and we were glad at heart.

That is evening, when the moon is high: here is morning lifting herself in exultation :

Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown
Full quire, and morning driv'n her plow of pearl,*
Far furrowing into light the mounded rack,
Beyond the fair green field and eastern lea.

This has that classic note of Milton, but it is quite original. There are many touches of Nature as fine as this in Locksley Hall, but that poem has far more to do with man than with Nature. It is, however, set in landscape which reflects the temper of the hero-sandy tracts on which the ocean thunders and the curlews cry-the sea-shore on one side, and the moorland on the other; and at the last, the vapour blackening from the moor with the blast in its breast to fall on Locksley Hall.

Compare the lines in The Princess:

Morn in the white wake of the morning star
Came furrowing all the orient into gold.

Every one knows this poem. Its form is good, its divisions clear. It passes from one division to another with ease and imagination. Every one knows the hero, with his hour of happy love, his rage of disillusion, his hope at the end that the living present may excite him by its science, and give him back his youthful inspiration. I never thought that this blustering youth, "weak as is a breaking wave," whom Tennyson invented so well, and who is so true to a common type-a type he lowers much further in the hero of Maud-would find any inspiration in science or the march of commerce ; and the second Locksley Hall, where Tennyson draws the same personage after he had settled on his lees, proves that he got no good out of science or the British carrying trade. But how modern it all is; how kindled Tennyson is by the time in which he was living, how alive to its wants, its strife, its faults, its good! We are miles and miles away from the temper in which Keats or Shelley regarded their world.

Three other poems in this volume may be called theological, and grouped together: St. Simeon Stylites, The Two Voices, and The Vision of Sin. The first is a study of the type of the ascetic in its extreme. Nevertheless, so ably, so robustly, and yet so delicately is it done that its spirit and its qualities belong to the whole range of ascetics, from Stylites down to the slightest subduer of the flesh. The conviction that all evil lies in matter and all good in its subjugation; that the more the flesh is punished, the more certain is salvation, and the greater the power of the punisher over matter, so that miracles are wrought; the claim, the right