such a man. Pope and Young were poets, but they were uncreative poets. Such men (who might also be called unartistic) reproduce things as they find them, either in wholes or fragments, embellishing or informing them with the imagination, according to their gift. One who is creative fuses them into a whole of his own. A creative poet, however, is by no means necessarily what may be called an initiatory poet. Shakspere and Tennyson are remarkable instances of the very highest creative impulse, with a tendency to assume, at secondhand, the nucleus of their creative effort. They love to give a new body to an old thought; they develop a suggestion; they find old nuts, and grow trees from them; they do not care to lay their own eggs. It is probable that Shakspere did not invent the whole plot of a single one of his plays; yet each is a true creation of his own. Shelley, on the other hand, initiated all his own poems, except the greatest of them, the Cenci. Wordsworth, where he lays hold of an incident or a scene, reproduces it just as it was; where he creates, he creates all, starting-point included. Many of Tennyson's finest poems are based on an external suggestion; such are "Ulysses," the "Lotos-eaters," "Enone," "St. Simeon Stylites," "Morte d'Arthur," "Mariana," "Godiva," "Sir Galahad," "St. Agnes," "Lady Clare," &c.; and of many others it is impossible to say whether they are thus based or not, only they do not, like the "Excursion," carry with them their own evidence of springing from the very germ, out of the poet's own mind. To say that Tennyson's genius is not dramatic, is certainly to contradict some of his critics. Something depends on what is meant by the term. He certainly has the power of penetrating the mood of another mind; but it will generally be found that this is another mind in a special situation, and this is a very different thing from exhibiting character through the medium of situations and the self-expression elicited by those situations, and in this, we take it, consists the essence of the drama. Tennyson can grasp character, otherwise he could not express a given mood in accordance with a given character, as he certainly does in the "Ulysses;" but he has not the least taste for reproducing character as such; he subordinates it to the presentment of an incident, a train of thought, a sentiment, or a picture. If he has occasion to use the dramatic form of self-expression, the absence of any real dramatic force is at once perceived. The young prince who relates the "Princess," uses the first person singular throughout, without giving us any idea of himself beyond what we gather from incidental description. Neither he nor the princess imposes on us for a moment, when employed to develop Mr. Tennyson's views on matrimony. This we know is what they were created for, with all their charming environment of scene and incident. We have vivid impressions of them and all the other persons of the story, but it is because they are admirably described. There is nothing dramatic in it: Mr. Tennyson is betrayed to every observer pulling the wires, and scarcely taking the trouble to alter his voice for the separate characters. In the latest poem, too, "Maud," the narrator is a mere morbid mouthpiece, and a very strange inconsistent medley of morbid matter he utters, more than is compatible with any method in his madness; and some degree of consistency is absolutely essential to the dramatic maniac; for instance, he, definitively, must not be sane and insane at one and the same time, and it is better and clearer if he is not both dead and alive. That singularly fine poem, the "Ulysses," best serves to illustrate the union in Tennyson of high creative genius with a foreign nucleus of conception, and the absence of all dramatic power. In this poem Mr. Tennyson takes a Greek legend, and catching it up at a single point, makes an original poem. He has been reading Homer, that is clear; but does he imitate Homer? No; it is Tennyson tinged with Homer. He makes Ulysses speak, to delineate a certain mood in the mind of Ulysses; one, however, which gathers up in it the whole of his character; it is, therefore, true to that character, yet Ulysses we know would never have said that and in that way. It is what he would have said, if, retaining his antique simplicity, he had become modernised, and at the same time seen himself as Tennyson sees him through his nineteenth-century eyes. What a wealth of imagery and diction is lavishly yet guardedly employed! There is a reticence of vivid, full imagination, which gives to the poem an inexpressible hold on the admiration of the reader. We pass to a characteristic of Tennyson's genius, which, perhaps, more than any other, has won him his well-deserved place in the estimation of a people so deeply imbued with the love of natural scenery as the English undoubtedly are. He has a power of reproducing external Nature in words, which is absolutely startling. The mode in which he does this cannot be said to be peculiar to him, but he has been the first to employ it to such an extent, and with so absolute a mastery, as to create a new school. He describes Nature through an appeal, not to our ideas, but to our imaginative perception. His words do really, of course, rely on our knowledge of words, yet they seem to present new things. He might be said to write to our senses. Shelley applies himself to our already-gathered imaginative associations with things; and these associations are what he himself employs; certain things, and even their representative words, to him contain certain impressions and impulses, and in this way he has in part classified the more distinct vehicles of special influences in the natural world. The face of earth was, with him, not made up of separate and distinct landscapes. Not that snow-clad range of Alpine brethren oppressing the air of Switzerland; not the fair Italian scenes as he gazed on them in his walks at Lucca, or trod the shore of the blue inland sea; not the special pictures which at various times she presented to his faithful and absorbed gaze, made up for him the aggregate of Nature. She was composed not merely of mountains, but of mountains modified by all that he had ever experienced in gazing on all mountains, of rivers and what rivers brought to his mind, fountains, winds, and flowers; all separate classes of beauty. Shelley's perceptions were so keen, and his sympathies so true, that he could give us back as it were the essence of every kind of natural object. Now Tennyson gives us back the things themselves, just as they stand in nature, with all the special environment that naturally belongs to them he transplants a landscape into his pages. If he dealt through the eye alone, we should say he was the most picturesque of poets. Read Shelley's description of his island retreat in Epipsychidion : "It is an isle under Ionian skies, And, for the harbours are not safe and good, There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide; As clear as elemental diamond, Or serene morning air; and far beyond, The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer (Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year), Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls The light, clear element, which the isle wears, Which is a soul within the soul-they seem It is an isle 'twixt heaven, air, earth, and sea, This is very lovely; it gives us the impression of a most delicious spot, but we don't see the island: it has all that such an island as he seeks should have, but you are placed in possession of its beauties, not landed on the place itself. Contrast it with pure description in Tennyson, such as the opening of "Enone :" "There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, Behind the valley topmost Gargarus Stands up and takes the morning; but in front Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel, The crown of Troas." Or, Sir Bedivere carrying the dying King Arthur to the lake: "But as he walk'd, King Arthur panted hard, When all the house is mute. So sigh'd the King, |