HE opinion that poetry has ceased to occupy the prominent place in the modern literature of Great Britain, which was obtained for it by the writers of the age immediately preceding our own, has now become very general. It is even supposed by someerroneously, as we conceive-that the tendencies of our time are inimical to the free outgoings of imagination, and that henceforth the poetic must give place to the strictly practical in the operations of the intellect. It would be difficult to imagine any period in the history of a people in which the mission of the poet was no longer to be recognised, or in which the materials of poetry could no longer be found. So long as the mind of man is constituted as it has been since the beginning of the world, so long as it has faculties that tend to poetry, and are incomplete in their development without it in one form or another, such an objection as the one we have stated can No. 72.

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scarcely be considered worthy of being refuted. It must be admitted, that in the age in which we live, no poet has risen to the altitude attained by some of his predecessors. This is perhaps the necessary consequence of that eminence having been previously attained. The taste, the faculty by which poetry is estimated as well as felt, has been thereby elevated; and much higher efforts are now necessary to reach the standard which that taste has set up, than were required fifty years ago. That the present, like all preceding ages, is a poetical one, will be best shewn by a reference to what it has produced; and it is therefore our object, in a brief and general review of the works of living British poets, to shew that they possess all the elements which are necessary for the cultivation of that sense of the beautiful in which consists our love of poetry. With that end in view, we need not stay to add another to the many attempts which have been made to define what poetry is. We cannot always explain, even to ourselves, the things we feel; and in connection with a subject which appeals so slightly to the reasoning faculty, and which admits of such full and forcible illustration, we deem it best to proceed upon the inference, that our readers can easily appreciate that combination of imagination and passion which constitutes a true poem. It is necessary, however, to state at the outset, that our observations and illustrations must be confined to the poets of the present generation. A survey, which would embrace the poetical literature of the last half century, or even the last thirty years, would include works which are now familiar to almost every reader; and our object is chiefly to deal with such as are comparatively little known. We cannot even extend our remarks to all the living poets, inasmuch as some of those who were the contemporaries of Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, and the writers of the last generation, still survive, and claim, in some measure, to be classed with those of the present. Strictly speaking, however, they exist only in their personality, and, as poets, must be ranked with those of the past. will be more in accordance with our purpose, then, to limit our application of the subject before us to those who may be regarded as the rising poets of the days in which we live, or who have yet to attain to that popularity which belongs to the works of some of their immediate predecessors. If we include in this class a poet so well known as ALFRED TENNYSON, it must be to place him at the head of it. A writer not only of acknowledged genius, but of acknowledged power, Tennyson may be said to represent the highest poetical tendencies of the age. Varied as is his style, from a marked simplicity equal to that of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, to a mystical romance, akin to the more obscure passages of Shelley, or the wilder ones of Coleridge, a unity of spirit pervades all his writings. His excellence is many-sided; his poetry is that of a largely receptive mind, not less than that of a deep and expansive sympathy. Subjective in the highest degree, it depends for its interest on a certain approximation on the part of

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THE LIVING POETS OF GREAT BRITAIN.

the reader to the poet's condition of soul, more than that of any of his contemporaries. Hence it is probable that many of his lyrics will have not only a higher significance to some minds than to others, but will afford that gratification which a direct appeal to our own consciousness almost always yields. On the other hand, there are beauties in them which depend on no such peculiarities for their effect, but are beauties, from their possessing all the charms which elevated feeling, luxurious imagery, and exquisite music, combine to give them. The Day Dream, The Palace of Art, Locksley Hall, The Talking Oak, and The Dream of Fair Women, contain many of these; in proof of which, we shall extract a few verses from the last-mentioned poem, a work abounding in rich and subtle fancies:

Those far-renowned brides of ancient song

Peopled the hollow dark, like burning stars ;
And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong,
And trumpets blown for wars.

At length I saw a lady within call,

Stiller than chiseled marble, standing there—
A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,

And most divinely fair.

Her loveliness, with shame and with surprise
Froze my swift speech; she turning on my face
The starlike sorrows of immortal eyes,

Spoke slowly in her place :

'I had great beauty-ask thou not my name;
No one can be more wise than destiny.

Many drew swords, and died. Where'er I came

I brought calamity.'

Wandering onward from this, the beauteous author of the siege of Troy, the poet encounters, each by each, the renowned women of the ancient world: Cleopatra—

A queen with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes,

Brow bound with burning gold;

and Rosamond with her 'low voice full of care;' Iphigenia by his side to her full height her stately stature draws;' and crossing his visionary path came

Her who knew that Love can vanquish Death,
Who kneeling, with one arm around her king,
Drew forth the poison with her balmy breath,
Sweet as new buds in spring;

and singing

Clearer than the crested bird

That claps his wings at dawn,

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THE LIVING POETS OF GREAT BRITAIN,

comes the daughter of the warrior Gileadite. She sings :

'It comforts me in this one thought to dwell,
That I subdued me to my father's will;
Because the kiss he gave me ere I fell
Sweetens the spirit still.

'Moreover, it is written that my race
Hewed Ammon hip and thigh from Aroer
On Arnon unto Minnith.' Here her face
Glowed as I looked at her.

She locked her lips; she left me where I stood,
'Glory to God,' she sang, and passed afar,

Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood
Toward the morning-star.

The music of Tennyson's verse may almost be said to suffice, in some cases, for our sense of the beautiful. It steals across the spirit like the first faint tones of the Eolian lyre, leaving its cadence only. Thus, in the three irregular, but most musical verses, entitled Claribel, the chief charm is that which melody exercises, or, rather, which proceeds from the exquisite adaptation of language to the tone :

Where Claribel low lieth,
The breezes pause and die,
Letting the rose-leaves fall;
But the solemn oak-tree sigheth
Thick-leaved, ambrosial

With an ancient melody
Of an inward agony

Where Claribel low lieth.

And again in The May Queen-a poem of touching tenderness, one of the poet's most truthful and complete productions—we have the same exquisite sense of music, though the cadence is of a livelier character:

You must wake and call me early-call me early, mother dear; To-morrow 'ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-yearOf all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest, the merriest day, For I'm to be Queen of the May, mother-I'm to be Queen of the May.

The reader of the poet's works will find this same melodious and deep-toned music, though of a wilder measure, in the powerful ballad of Oriana, and, indeed, in almost all his finer lyrics. We turn, however, to notice another characteristic of his geniusnamely, his power of elaborate, and yet exquisitely light and graceful description. Akin to the inventory which Shakspeare makes of the chamber of Lucrece, or to that most artistic of all

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the poems of John Keats, The Eve of St Agnes, is Tennyson's picture of the Sleeping Beauty, in his poem entitled The Day Dream-a poem founded on the old Eastern tale of the enchanted palace, the inmates of which could only be disenthralled by the advent of the adventurous lover who should wake the princess from her charmed sleep with a kiss. Here is the picture of the lady in her enchanted slumber :

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Year after year unto her feet,
She lying on her couch alone,
Across the purple coverlet

The maiden's jet black hair has grown,
On either side her tranced form

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

The silk star-broidered coverlid
Unto her limbs itself doth mould
Languidly ever; and amid

Her full black ringlets downward rolled,
Glows forth each softly rounded arm
With bracelets of the diamond bright;
Her constant beauty doth inform

Stillness with love and day with light.

:

She sleeps her breathings are not heard
In palace chambers far apart;

The fragrant tresses are not stirred
That lie upon her charmed 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.

These lines are unsurpassed for their fancifully graphic power by anything which Tennyson has written. In his Morte d'Arthura far higher effort of the imagination-there are passages of still and lonely grandeur, which contain pictures of a broader outline; in Dora-a simple and beautiful poem-there are more homely ones; and from The Princess, many pages might be quoted illustrative of the same graces of fancy; but in none of these do we find a greater luxuriousness and warmth. Tennyson's descriptive writing differs from what is usually styled descriptive poetry, in the success with which general features are brought out, rather than in minute accuracy of detail. His pictures are fresh and sunny as those of a Ruysdaal; or they contain, in a few vivid images, a completeness which fills the imagination with the landscape, and displays it to the mind's eye in all its suggestive beauty. We may illustrate this by two extracts-the one affording a fine glimpse of rural