the yellowest of yellow carrots, on their road to Spitalfields, the Borough, and Newgate Markets. My halfway house I made at the early breakfast establishment near the outside porch of Shoreditch Church, where I regaled myself with a thick hunk of new bread obtained from a neighbouring baker, and a pint of sweet warm milk ladled out in true Cockney fashion from the polished tin cans of Laycock's Dairy. Turning round, my eyes alighted on an inscription on a tomb close at hand-"Dr. Gardner's last and best bedroom." "Perhaps," said I to myself, "the eccentric doctor was not far wrong in thus curtly describing the character of his final restingplace."

D. MORIER EVANS.

TENNYSON AND BROWNING.

HILE Europe is but just emerging from one of the most terrible wars that the world's history has to chronicle, we Britons, valuing peace as a possession whose worth we have proved, have still continued in our path of calm though speedy progress-in thought and practice, in science and art, by land and sea, at home and abroad-in spite of the harmless contempt of Europe and the indignant protests of a small but noisy section of our fellow-countrymen.

Now peace makes rich, and riches encourage Art, whilst Art, thus encouraged, in her turn reflects in her every accent, expression, and motion the serene influences that control her, as surely as her voice, and form, and features would respond, were war upon us, to all the wild exultations or despairs of victory or defeat.

This is, after all, but an old thought clothed in new words, but its repetition leads us more fully to realise what is the present mission amongst us of Poetry-alike the most divine and the most human of the daughters of Art. Art, whom we may justly call the idealisation of truth, be truth's teachings sweet or harsh, terrible or tender, as they

may.

What, then, are the poetic art-truths that we recognise as most representative of the age in which we live?

One swift retrospective glance over the past half century is sufficient to show us that its peaceful course has been throughout a period of growth-not one of stagnation or decay.

Morally and socially we have been gainers-our intellectualism is more wide-spread, if less individually solid; literature has become an honourable profession; whilst music and the fine arts have received an annually increasing encouragement amongst us.

All these good influences—moral, social, intellectual, artistic-find expression in a greater or less degree in the works of Mr. Tennyson. But a prosperous peace is almost necessarily attended by a leaning towards epicureanism-which, if too deeply indulged in, may grow into a positive evil, as it is in danger of becoming amongst us at the present time; and the effect of this insidious influence upon life and thought constitutes the one great weakness of our present Laureate—

a human weakness, no doubt, and, in a poet of his sensuous nature, a pardonable-nay, an almost justifiable one. We go even further, and say that we do not believe that without it the poet would have had half the influence for good which by its possession he has gained over the public mind, for without this epicureanism he would not have been the representative poet that he is. With it he at times strikes through our senses to the very innermost depths of our nature, with a strange subtlety that is entirely his own, whilst its ill effects are only evident in occasional affectation and self-consciousness, and much over-fastidiousness of impression-never in sensuality as opposed to sensuousness.

But let us endeavour to support this view of Mr. Tennyson's representative character as a poet by a general survey of his writings. The Laureate's earliest poems are conspicuous for richness of colour and beauty of expression; but are wanting in thought and imagination.

It would appear that, feeling his intellectual powers as a poet to be undeveloped, he threw himself heart and soul into the congenial study of the more sensuous beauties of art and nature; and to this early instinct we are indebted for some of the most exquisitely picturesque and melodious idylls in any language, such as the two Marianas, "The Dying Swan," and, later on, in 1832, "Enone" and "The Lotos-eaters."

The poem of "The Dying Swan" will exemplify our view of the undeveloped character of Mr. Tennyson's powers at this period. It is obvious that it is the voice of the swan itself, and not the scene in which its music is supposed to be heard, that should be the strong central charm of the poem. No accessories, however picturesque, should draw off our attention from that passionate outpouring of a joyous, sensuous life, rendered sweeter and stranger by the mysterious gift of song which half humanises and altogether glorifies the wild death-notes of the beautiful bird, and commingled, it may be, with the divination of a still more delicious lot hereafter, in a state from which the singer might, with Horace's deathless poet, have sprung. But few admirers of this poem-and it has many—will acknowledge enjoying the poem in any other sense than as a most exquisitely faithful study of nature.

"The Palace of Art" may be regarded as Mr. Tennyson's first philosophical assay. This poem, fine though it is in conception, and elaborately finished in expression as we must allow it to be, gives, after all, but a very faint promise of the speculative power of "The Two Voices." In these, the future Laureate's first fruits to Apollo, we

find considerable feeling, marred though it too often is by affected turns of thought and language; a graceful play of fancy, and yet apparently no sense of humour; but, above all, a pre-eminent command over every tone and shade of word-music and poetic colouring. Altogether we encounter a poet with about as much promise as Keats displayed in his first poem; a lyrist as truly idyllic, as tender, and if not as sprightly, well-nigh as sensuous, as the author of “Endymion,” but with the great advantages of a more educated ear and judgment than the earlier poet had attained to.

In 1842 appeared the "Mort d'Arthur," which at once established Mr. Tennyson's claim to be a poet in the highest sense of the wordno mere poetical medium for this age's expression of her sense of the beauties of a serene nature and a peaceful art, but the maker, the creator of a distinctive work which, as long as our language lasts, must be read and rejoiced in.

There is no want of imagination here, however wanting in it Tennyson may be elsewhere. Witness the poet's comparison of the cry that went up from the three queens, when Sir Bedivere bore the wounded Arthur down to their barge, to "a wind that shrills all night in a waste land where no one comes, nor hath come, since the making of the world." And there is a calm, self-contained strength about the whole poem that places it on a level with perhaps any single passage of Milton. It is a pity that it should ever have been preluded by such a self-conscious strain as "The Epic "-which, we are glad to think, there is now no possible reason for reprinting.

The consideration of the "Mort d'Arthur" naturally leads us on to the consideration of Mr. Tennyson's claims as a narrative poet. That he is not an epic one is at once evident to any of his readers.

Even if we could not lay our finger on a passage which shows his familiarity and sympathy with Virgil, we should have hazarded the conviction that the Laureate had a strong fellow-feeling for that great classic. Compare some of the early idyllic pieces of Mr. Tennyson with the "Eclogues" and some parts of the" Georgics," and a strong similarity of poetic power displays itself. That gift which has been so aptly called "the harvest of the quiet eye," appears peculiarly characteristic of them both, as does that exquisite finish, expression, and form which we find alike in the "Pollio" and "Enone."

But in the "Song of Silenus" we find the promise of a fuller imaginative grandeur than in any of Tennyson's earlier poems, and when we afterwards contrast the most ambitious efforts of the two poets, we have no hesitation in giving the palm to the ancient in preference to the modern.

We may notice, en passant, a curious coincidence in the choice of the subjects of their two longest poems by Virgil and Tennyson.

Arthur, like Æneas, is a reputed national hero, whose adventures are equally fictitious if not equally well told; and yet there is a want of human interest in them both that is evident to every thoughtful student of their characters.

name.

The "Æneid" is to the full as mythical as the "Arthuriad "—if we may venture to call Mr. Tennyson's Round Table cycle by that And in the consummate finish of its revised books, and in the idyllic character of its episodes, it will bear comparison with our Laureate's best passages; but beyond this it would be hardly fair to contrast the two works.

For the " Æneid" has all the continuity of a great epic, however wanting it may at times be in dramatic simplicity; whilst the "Arthuriad" is a succession of epopees, all of them no doubt bearing upon the same subject, yet so loosely strung together that their order. might be indeed, has been-altered by their author without any violence being done to the text.

The interest of these idyllic epopees is, on the whole, well-sustained, though in some of them, and notably in "The Holy Grail," it suffers from the realistic mind of the author, who too often appears for a time to forget his theme in almost microscopic contemplation of the scenes which he is describing.

A lady of unusual analytic power once noticed to us how in the "Idylls of the King," as the first published poems of the "Arthuriad" are called, Mr. Tennyson rings out three distinct changes of the passion of love: true love of man and wife in Enid; man's and woman's disappointed love, in Elaine and Guinevere. Turning ourselves to Vivien, we observe the darkest side of passion powerfully depicted, whilst the new poems of the "Arthuriad" will at once suggest the further phases of maiden love and love wasted on an unworthy woman. Perhaps no poet ever followed this master-passion through so many of its moods.

Here Mr. Tennyson's representative character again appears.

Ours is not an age for long epics, as the author of the "Earthly Paradise" appears to have proved since the publication of his "Jason." We are too restless, too fond of change of all kind, for "Odysseys" and "Eneids," as we are too self-absorbed and undemonstrative for the drama. The subjective lyric and the idyllic narrative of Mr. Tennyson are, therefore, the fit expression of the spirit of the time, overflowing as they are with nervous versatility. drama and epic will doubtless revive in some form or other with VOL. VII., N.S. 1871.

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