mind,

In the hollow lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills, like gods together, careless of mankind.'

It is no objection to this charming little poem, but an additional merit, that it is not necessary to have eaten of the lotos to sympathize with the strain of feeling which it so beautifully describes.

From the poems of Mr. Tennyson might be selected quite a little gallery of female portraits, all distinguished for their grace and purity. We will present our readers with a glance of the chief of them. First in order is the young and laughing Lilian :

The mystic Adeline must not be so briefly dismissed. Who has not, at least when his eyesight was very young, encountered some fair lady whose visual orbs seemed to be full of some profound, sweet melancholy, some super-terestrial meaning, which he in vain essayed to penetrate? In after-years we probably solved the riddle in a very cold and sceptical manner, concluding that, whatever beauty there might have been in those eyes, there was no peculiar thought of any kind-that, in fact, there was no meaning to divine, and this mysterious semblance of thought was but the play of our own imagination. This most prosaic explanation, we must, however, for the present dismiss, and listen to the fanciful conjectures of the poet :

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 rose lips and full black eyes
Take the heart from out my breast:
Wherefore those dim looks of thine,
Shadowy, dreaming 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 blue-bell rings

To the mosses underneath? 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 soften'd, shadow'd brow, And those dew-lit eyes of thine, Thou faint smiler, Adeline?'

'You love, remaining peacefully,
To hear the murmur of the strife,
But enter not the toil of life.
You are the evening star, alway
Remaining betwixt dark and bright:
Lull'd echoes of laborious day

Come to you, gleams of mellow light That float by you in the verge of night. A fairy shield your genius made

And gave you on your natal day;
Your sorrow only sorrow's shade,

Keeps real sorrow far away.
You move not in such solitudes,
You are not less divine,
But more human in your moods

Than your twin sister Adeline.
Your hair is darker, and your eyes
Touched with a somewhat darker hue,
And less aerially blue;

But ever trembling through the dew Of dainty-woful sympathies.'

Of the serene, imperial Eleänore, we have only room to quote the following lines.

His bow-string slackened, languid Love, Leaning his cheek upon his hand, Droops both his wings regarding thee, And so would languish evermore, Serene, imperial Eleanore.'

St. Simeon Stylites is a poem of a very different and sterner character from any we have hitherto referred to. It is a portraiture, we need hardly say, of that unfortunate enthusiast, who, thinking to win Heaven by inflicting tortures upon himself, at length contrived to live day and night upon the narrow summit of a high pillar. Such fanatics as Simeon have their places, it is true, in the history of Christianity, but their monstrous penances are rather to be attributed to the previously current superstitions of the East, which intruded themselves into Christianity, than to any perversions, however extraordinary, of the doctrines of our religion. At all periods, indeed, many excellent but mistaken men have thought to earn tranquillity and peace of mind by inflicting pain and privation upon the body. They might almost as reasonably have reversed the experiment, and hoped to secure health of body by torturing the mind. But it was no mistake of this description, which such fanatics as Simeon made. Peace and tranquillity of mind were not amongst the objects they were in search of. These Christian Fakirs held that so much torture was so much merit, and was entitled to so much recompense. It was present agony paid for future joy in paradise. Our poet has presented us with a faithful sketch of this fanatical spirit, with its alternate exultation and despondency, its fluctuations between egregious pride and utter prostration of mind, together with its moments of mental wandering and self-bewilderment. Here is a brief specimen :

But yet,

Bethink thee, Lord, while thou and all the saints
Enjoy themselves in Heaven, and men on earth
House in the shade of comfortable roofs,
Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food,
And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have
stalls,

I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light,
Bow down one thousand and two hundred times
To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints;
Or in the night, after a little sleep,
I wake; the chill stars sparkle; I am wet
With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost.
I wear an undress'd goatskin on my back;
A grazing iron collar grinds my neck ;

And strive and wrestle with thee till I die : O mercy, mercy! wash away my sin.

O Lord, thou knowest what a man I am;
A sinful man, conceived and born in sin :
'Tis their own doing; this is none of mine;
Lay it not to me. Am I to blame for this,
That here come those that worship me? Ha! ha!
They think that I am somewhat What am I?
The silly people take me for a saint,
And bring me offerings of fruit and flowers,
And I, in truth (thou wilt bear witness here,)
Have all in all endured as much, and more
Than many just and holy men, whose names
Are register d and calendar'd for saints.

Good people, you do ill to kneel to me.
What is it I can have done to merit this?
I am a sinner viler than you all.
It may be I have wrought some miracles,

And cured some halt and maim'd. But what of that?

:

It may be, no one, even among the saints,
May match his pain with mine. But what of that?
Yet do not rise for you may look on me,
And in your looking you may kneel to God.
Speak! is there any of you halt or maim'd?
think you know I have some power with Heaven
From my long penance: let him speak his wish.'

I

We willingly turn from this gloomy portraiture to something of a gayer strain, which we shall not have long to seek for amongst the poems of this author. The Talking Oak is a charming production. If the trees should take to talking in this style, mere human tongues may give up the trade. But we feel that if we meddle with this discourse of the talking oak, we must quote it all. There are some poems the merit of which cannot be made known by any extracts, however partially selected; so little does the charm lie in this or that verse, but in the grace diffused over the whole. If any one, after having been delighted by a piece of this description, wishes to make his friend participate in his admiration, he is surprised at the difficulty he finds in fixing upon a passage which will justify his applause. The beauty of the poem seems to evaporate when he reviews it verse by verse. He begins to suspect that he himself had strangely overrated its merit. Just such a piece is The Talking Oak. Therefore we will pass it by, and select in preference some passages from The Day Dream.

This is an elegant recital of a fairy legend, which tells how a king, with all his court, and all the inmates of his palace, were drowned in deep slumber for a hundred years -how a thick tall hedge grew round the palace, and hid it from all intruders-how his daughter, the princess, lay in her apart

extremely happy in his expressions. He has very many lines and phrases of remarkably graphic power. But at the risk of being deemed fastidious, we will venture on this objection, that the circumstances which he seizes upon in his descriptions often appear to have been sought after with effort; they are not such as would spontaneously suggest themselves to the imagination; and consequently the reader has a similar effort to make, in putting these materials together to form a picture for himself. They have the air of having been torn and wrenched from their place; they could not be described in the language of another poet as being

The harvest of a quiet eye.'

Mariana has often been quoted as a remarkable instance of Mr. Tennyson's power to paint a scene. Without denying its merits, we confess it does not altogether please

us.

To us the description is marred by the violent effort to describe. The writer does not appear to stand in singleness of mind before his object, and looking at it with his heart in his eyes, as is the manner of poets, record what he sees; he rather seems to

pry curiously about it in quest of poetic circumstance. Here is the commencement of the poem, and we do not think we could make a more favorable extract.

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 strauge,
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!''

In this there are, without doubt, very graphic touches, but we feel ourselves abruptly plunged amongst details, which we have to put together for ourselves in the best manner we are able. An effect is produced as if the several objects had been cut out of a picture; and the brilliant fragments were thrown at hap-hazard before us.

The Lady of Shalott is another poem often cited with great applause by the professed admirers of Mr. Tennyson, and which we like still less. Together with a series

of descriptions which have the same air of abruptness, and which bring with them the same uncomfortable feeling of effort, we have a story so obscurely told, that we would on no account take upon ourselves the responsibility of giving the briefest summary of it. We confess ourselves simple and prosaic enough, wherever there is anything like a story, to wish, like the children, to know what it is about. It is no answer to say, that there is magic and mystery in it, and that it deals with the supernatural. A fact may be as miraculous or as monstrous as you please, it is still a fact, and should be intelligibly narrated. The enchantments of the Arabian Nights are as distinctly told as the tamest incidents of a domestic novel. If it had been otherwise, they would never have done. Even where the story is incomhave gained the ear of the world as they plete, where the events are unexplained, and it is the very purpose of the writer to

leave us with a feeling of unsatisfied curiosity, still so much of the narrative as is intended to be communicated, should be communicated distinctly. We should know it is that remains to be explained; we must what it is that constitutes the marvel, what see plainly some portion of the thread, if only to perceive that it breaks off. The poem is written, too, in a style of versification which to us is extremely disagreeable. But to make our objection on this head intelligible, we must quote two of the stanzas.

THE LADY OF SHALOTT.

'On either side the river lie,
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the world and meet the sky;
And through the field the road runs by
To many-tower'd Camelot;

And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.

'Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Through the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river,

Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls and four gray towers
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.'

And so on, through the whole poem, the first part of the stanza ending with ' Camelot,' and the second with The Lady of Shalott,' or 'Island of Shalott,' terminations which do not even form a rhyme; though perhaps we have no right to com