And newness of thine art so pleased thee, That all which thou hast drawn of fairest

Or boldest since, but lightly weighs With thee unto the love thou bearest The firstborn of thy genius. Artist-like, Ever retiring thou dost gaze

On the prime labour of thine early days:
No matter what the sketch might be;
Whether the high field on the bushless Pike,
Or even a sandbuilt ridge

Of heaped hills that mound the sea,
Overblown with murmurs harsh,

Or even a lowly cottage, whence we see
Stretch'd wide and wild the waste enormous

marsh,

Where from the frequent bridge,
Emblems or glimpses of eternity,
The trenched waters run from sky to sky;
Or a garden bower'd close

With pleached alleys of the trailing rose,
Long alleys falling down to twilight grots,
Or opening upon level plots
Of crowned lilies, standing near
Purplespiked lavender :
Whither in after life retired

From brawling storms,
From weary wind,

With youthful fancy reinspired,
We may hold converse with all forms
Of the many-sided mind,

The few whom passion hath not blinded,
Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded,
My friend, with thee to live alone,
Methinks were better than to own
A crown, a sceptre, and a throne.
O strengthen me, enlighten me!
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory

1

There is fine music there; the versification would be felt delightful to all poetical ears, even if they missed the many meanings of the wellchosen and happily-obedient words; for there is the sound as of a variousvoiced river rejoicing in a sudden summer shower, that swells without staining its translucent waters. But the sound is echo to the sense; and the sense is sweet as that of life's dearest emotions enjoyed in "a dream that is not all a dream."

Mr Tennyson, when he chooses, can say much in few words. A fine example of that is shewn in five fewsyllabled four-lined stanzas on a Deserted House. Every word tells; and the short whole is most pathetic in its completeness-let us say perfection-like some old Scottish air sung by maiden at her wheel-or shepherd in the wilderness.

THE DESERTED HOUSE.

Life and Thought have gone away
Side by side,

Leaving door and windows wide :
Careless tenants they!

All within is dark as night:
In the windows is no light;
And no murmur at the door,
So frequent on its hinge before.

Close the door, the shutters close,
Or through the windows we shall see
The nakedness and vacancy

10

Of the dark deserted house,
Come away: no more of mirth
Is here, or merrymaking sound...
The house was builded of the earth,
And shall fall again to ground.

Come away: for Life and Thought
Here no longer dwell;

But in a city glorious-
A great and distant city have bought
A mansion incorruptible.

"Would they could have stayed with us! Mr Tennyson is sometimes too mystical; for sometimes we fear there is no meaning in his mysticism; or so little, that were it to be stated perspicuously and plainly, 'twould be but a point. But at other times he gives us sweet, still, obscure poems, like the gentle gloaming saddening all that is sad, and making nature's self pensive in her depth of peace. Such is the character of

A DIRGE.

Now is done thy long day's work; Fold thy palms across thy breast,

There is profound pathos in "Mariana." The young poet had been dreaming of Shakspeare, and of Measure for Measure, and of the gentle lady all forlorn, the deserted of the false Angelo, of whom the Swan of Avon sings but some few low notes in her distress and desolation, as she wears away her lonely life in solitary tears at "the moated grange." On this hint Alfred Tennyson speaks ; "he has a vision of his own;" nor might Wordsworth's self in his youth have disdained to indite such melancholy strain. Scenery-state-emotion-character-are all in fine keeping; long, long, long indeed is the dreary day, but it will end at last; so finds the heart-broken prisoner who, from sunrise to sunset, has been leaning on the sun-dial in the centre of his narrow solitude!

MARIANA.

"Mariana in the moated grange."
Measure for Measure.

With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all,
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach to the garden wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange,
Unlifted was the clinking latch,
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch,
Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said:
She said, I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'

Her tears fell with the dews at even,
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried,
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky, She drew her casement curtain by, And glanced athwart the glooming flats. She only said, 'The night is dreary,

He cometh not,' she said:
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the nightfowl crow :
The cock sung out an hour ere light:

From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the grey-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, 'The day is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said:
She said, I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'
About a stonecast from the wall,
A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The clustered marishmosses crept.

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound" Her sense; but most she loath'd the hour ***When the thickmoted sunbeam lay

Athwart the chambers, and the day
Downsloped was westering in his bower.
Then, said she, ' I am very dreary,
He will not come,' she said:
She wept, I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!'

It is not at all necessary that we should understand fine poetry to feel and enjoy it, any more than fine music. That is to say, some sorts of fine poetry-the shadowy and the spiritual; where something glides before' us ghostlike, "now in glimmer and now in gloom," and then away into some still place of trees or tombs. Yet the poet who composes it, must weigh the force of every feeling word-in a balance true to a hair, for ever vibrating, and obedient to the touch of down or dewdrop. Think not that such process interrupts inspiration; it sustains

,

and feeds it; for it becomes a habit of the heart and the soul in all their musings and meditations; and thus is the language of poetry, though human, heavenly speech. In reading it, we see new revelations on each rehearsal-all of them true, though haply different-and what we at first thought a hymn, we may at last feel to be an elegy-a breathing not about the quick, but the dead. So was it with us in reading over and over again " Claribel." We supposed the lady slept beneath the "solemn oaktree, thick-leaved, ambrosial;" and that the "ancient melody" was dimly heard by her in her world of dreams. But we know now that only her dust is there; and that the character of her spirit, as it dwelt on earth, is shadowed forth by the congenial scenery of her burial-place. But "Adeline" is alive-faintly-smiling-sha

dowy-dreaming-spiritual Adeline -such are the epithets bestowed by the poet on that Lady of Light who visits his visions-though doomed to die-or rather to melt away back to her native heaven.

ADELINE.

MYSTERY of mysteries,
Faintly-smiling Adeline,
Scarce of earth, nor all divine,
Nor unhappy, nor at rest;
But beyond expression fair,
With thy floating flaxen hair,

Thy roselips and full blue eyes
Take the heart from out my breast;
Wherefore those dim looks of thine,
Shadowy, dreaming Adeline?
Whence that aery bloom of thine,
Like a lily which the sun
Looks through in his sad decline,
And a rosebush leans upon,
Thou that faintly smilest still,
As a Naiad in a well,

Looking at the set of day,
Or a phantom two hours old

Of a maiden past away,
Ere the placid lips be cold?
Wherefore those faint smiles of thine,
Spiritual Adeline?

What hope or fear or joy is thine?
Who talketh with thee, Adeline?

For sure thou art not all alone.
Do beating hearts of salient springs
Keep measure with thine own?

Hast thou heard the butterflies
What they say betwixt their wings?
Or in stillest evenings
With what voice the violet woos
To his heart the silver dews?

Or when little airs arise,

How the merry bluebell rings

To the mosses underneath?
Hast thou looked upon the breath
Of the lilies at sunrise?
Wherefore that faint smile of thine,
Shadowy, dreaming Adeline?

Some honey-converse feeds thy mind,
Some spirit of a crimson rose
In love with thee forgets to close

His curtains, wasting odorous sighs
All night long on darkness blind.
What aileth thee? whom waitest thou
With thy softened, shadowed brow,

And those dewlit eyes of thine,
Thou faint smiler, Adeline?
Lovest thou the doleful wind

When thou gazest at the skies?
Doth the low-tongued Orient
Wander from the side o' the morn
Dripping with Sabæan spice.
On thy pillow, lowly bent.
With melodious airs lovelorn,
Breathing light against thy face,
While his locks a-dropping twined

Round thy neck in subtle ring,
Make a carcanet of rays,

And ye talk together still,
In the language wherewith spring
Letters cowslips on the hill?
Hence that look and smile of thine,
Spiritual Adeline.

The life of Claribel was shadowed forth by images of death-the death of Adeline seemed predicted by images of life-and in the lovely lines on the Sleeping Beauty, life and death meet in the stillness of that sleep-so profound that it is felt as if it were immortal. And is there not this shading and blending of all feeling and all thought that regards the things we most tenderly and deeply love on this changeful earth?

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

Year after year unto her feet,

The while she slumbereth alone,

Over the purpled coverlet

The maiden's jet black hair hath grown, On either side her trancéd form

Forth streaming from a braid of pearl; The slumb'rous light is rich and warm, And moves not on the rounded curl..

The silk star-braided coverlid

Unto her limbs itself doth mould Languidly ever, and amid

Her full black ringlets downward roll'd Glows forth each softly shadow'd arm, With bracelets of the diamond bright; Her constant beauty doth inform

Stillness with love and day with light.
VOL. XXXI. NO. CXCIV,

She sleeps; her breathings are not heard
In palace chambers far apart;
The fragrant tresses are not stirred
That lie upon her charméd heart.
She sleeps; on either side upswells
The gold fringed pillow lightly prest;
She sleeps, nor dreams, but ever dwells
A perfect form in perfect rest.

Some of our old ballads, breathed in the gloom of forests or glens by shepherds or woodsmen, are in their earnest simplicity inimitable by genius born so many centuries since they died, and overshadowed by another life. Yet genius has often delighted to sink away into such moods as those in which it imagines those lowly men to have been lost when they sang their songs, "the music of the heart," with nothing

that moved around them but antlers of the deer, undisturbed by the bard lying among the breckens or the broom, beneath the checkered light that came through the umbrage of the huge oak-tree, on which spring was hourly shedding a greener glory, or autumn a more golden decay. Shepherds and woodsmen, too, there have been in these later days, and other rural dwellers, who have somestrain-Robert, James, and Allantimes caught the spirit of the antique whose happiest "auld ballants" are

as if obsolete forest-flowers were brought back to life on our banks and braes. Perhaps the most beautiful of all Alfred Tennyson's compositions, is the "Ballad of Oriana,"

THE BALLAD OF ORIANA.

My heart is wasted with my woe,