Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound, Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more, But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground, Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar, Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave, Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave." He meets Maud abroad with her brother as she rides by the moor, and he fancies that "The fire of a foolish pride flashed o'er her beautiful face;" and so he contrasts her wealth with his own poor condition, and his pride leads him to philosophise, and form such resolutions as lovers do, and he determines to flee from the cruel madness of love. This phase of feeling is followed by another, the trne exposition of which we are not quite sure that we have discovered. "A voice by the cedar-tree" sings to him a passionate ballad Of men that in battle array, Ready in heart and ready in hand, March with banner and bugle and fife To the death, for their native land." This voice seems an allegory-the spirit of war breathing into his soul. Be it what it may, it is full of delicious cadences-wild and beautiful, and just what Tennyson delights to throw offcontrasting strongly in the structure of its versification, as well as in its tone of feeling, from all that has preceded it. Indeed it is quite evident that the poet has designed by a change in the whole style of his verse, to exhibit and illustrate a corresponding change in the heart and feeling of the lover for lover now he is. The strong, rugged, nervous force of the long lines gives place to very sweet and tender measures of varying length, which, however careless they may appear in their rhythm, are nevertheless managed with great skill; and from this out, through the progress of the poem and to its end, we recognise these peculiar modes of thought and expression, which are such distinctive characteristics of Tennyson, as to have received his own name as designating a style. Thus we have the next casual meeting of the lovers described in true Tennysonian fashion: VOL. XLVI.-NO. CCLXXIII. "Whom but Maud should I meet sweet She made me divine amends For a courtesy not return'd. "And thus a delicate spark Of glowing and growing light And then come two other casual encounters, which are told with such simple pathos, yet such picturesque vividness, that we cannot resist the pleasure of quoting them entire, Here is the first : "She came to the village church, And thicker, until I heard no longer 'No surely, now it cannot be pride.'" This is very exquisite word-painting. One has the whole picture before the eye, as if wrought by the artist's pencil; and something more than the eye can take in from form or colour-the subtle heart-emotions of love. The other picture is as briefly sketched, but not less perfect : "I was walking a mile, More than a mile from the shore, And riding at set of day She waved to me with her hand. The two that are at the side of Maud are her brother, "a jewelled mass of millinery," an "oiled and curled Assyrian Bull," and a suitor in the shape of a new-made lord, who has found out his jewel. The youth is sick at heart, jealous, and splenetic, and so he deals out harsh personalities against both, and declaims against the aristocrat in the staple invective with which jealous and splenetic men assail wealth and power. However, he meets Maud in the wood, and kisses her hand, and she takes the kiss sedately, whereby he finds that his love is returned; and so he sings, in the fulness of his heart, a jubilant song, which is full of such charming fancies that we cannot resist quoting it : "Birds in the high Hall-garden When twilight was falling, Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, They were crying and calling. "Where was Maud? in our wood; "Birds in our woods sang "I kiss'd her slender hand, She took the kiss sedately; But she is tall and stately. "I to cry out on pride Who have won her favour! "I know the way she went Home with her maiden posy, "Birds in the high Hall-garden "Look, a horse at the door, And little King Charles is snarling, Then he leads home his love, having arranged to meet her on the morrow night in her own rose-garden, where her brother, the squire, is giving a grand political dinner. The thoughts of the young man, as he waits her arrival in the garden, are given in a succession of charming verses, in which the passionate fervour of manly love are tempered and chastened with a sense of the pure; they are at once voluptuous and delicate-such as are some of the fine songs of Shelley. We will quote one or two of these "There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dearShe is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near;' And the white rose weeps, 'She is late;' The larkspur listens, I hear, I hear;' And the lily whispers, 'I wait.'" Maud's brother surprises the lovers; he is of course in a rage, gives the young man the lie, and strikes him, in the presence of the babe-faced lord. A duel follows, and "Front to front in an hour we stood, And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke That must have life for a blow." The brother is slain, and his murderer flies to France, where he becomes a prey to remorse, and sorrow, and love; and visions of his lost Maud and her slain brother are ever haunting his brain and his heart by day and by night, in the solitude and in "the hubbub of the market," till at length he is driven well-nigh mad. We follow this course of feeling in the snatches of strange, wild thoughts through which the mind of the unhappy lover is from time to time displayed, as some deep stream is shown in a dark night through the flashings of lightning. From some of these ravings we learn that Maud, too, dies: "She is standing here at my head; Not beautiful now, not even kind: But is ever the one thing silent here. She is not of us, as I divine; She comes from another stiller world of the dead, Stiller, not fairer than mine." At length the young man is restored to his right mind, and he seeks in war a new aim and a higher object than love, guided to that object by her whom he loved. We shall give the concluding section of the poem : "My life has crept so long on a broken wing That like a silent lightning under the stars She seem'd to divide in a dream from a band of the blest, "And it was but a dream, yet it yielded a dear delight The glory of manhood stand on his ancient height, "And as months ran on and rumour of battle grew, That old hysterical mock-disease should die.' And I stood on a giant deck and mix'd my breath "Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll'd! Such is Tennyson's "Maud"-in some sort a romance of love, but with a deeper meaning and object. It is a vehicle for something more than sweet erotic thoughts and gentle heart emotions: it is a medium by which the poet seeks to send throughout the world his thoughts upon one of those great and perplexing social problemsWar. He would teach us that Peace has its evils, its temptations for man; that it brings the lust of gain, making the spirit sordid; soiling the purity of the soul; teaching men to lie and cheat; cankering the heart, making the body effeminate, and filling society with internal strife and hatred, with "the spirit of Cain," which is worse than open warfare. He would teach us, too, that war, like the tempest in the hands of God, is not a minister of unalloyed evil; that it purifies the moral atmosphere, while it devastates; that if its cause be holy, it brings its own sanctification; that it energises, exalts, ennobles, by giving occasion for the exercise and display of the manlier virtues-courage, and endurance, and self-reliance, and generosity. How far this philosophy is right, this is scarcely the place to discuss. Un doubtedly in the dispensations of God we see little provision, as the world is now constituted, for the total cessation of warfare; nor can we look for such a consummation till the time arrive, if it ever shall, when the voice of Reason shall be heard above that of passion and self-interest, and Right, by her intrinsic excellence, shall dominate And so it is that our over Might. peace-preachers all begin at the wrong end; they must first reform the human heart; they must do what Tennyson, in his caustic sarcasm against them, bids them to do: "Put down the passions that make earth hell! Down with ambition, avaric, pride. Jealousy, down! cut off from the mind The bitter springs of anger and fear ; Down, too, down at your own fireside, With the evil tongue and the evil ear, For each is at war with mankind." When they shall have done all this, or the half of this, they shall have the human mind in a very fit state to receive the seeds of their peace philosophy; but till this reform is worked out, "the broad-brimm'd hawker of holy things" will preach in vain. They that will cheat, and plunder, and do violence, in the small things of the world, will do so in the greater. There is no restraint in the one case but the sword of the civil power, in the other but the sword of war. Still we are not prepared to yield a full assent to the philosophy enunciated in this poem. If Peace have its vices and its evils, they are those which grow rather out of the frailty and feebleness of humanity, than from anything positively detrimental in a state of quiet. Neither can we believe that the rust which the mind contracts is to be washed out by blood. The best that can be said is, that the all-adjusting wisdom of God has decreed that War shall bring its compensating blessings, as Peace is not exempt from its qualifying evils that each, like the waves of the in-flowing ocean, move forward on their destined course, though they often seem to recede from it. But it is not the philosophy of "Maud" that we mean to discuss, but its poetic merits, from which we have somehow been seduced for a moment. As a poem we must rank it decidedly below "The Princess." It has not the same continuity and sustained power; on the contrary, it is broken and abrupt, reminding us of a beautiful landscape seen upon the face of some agitated lake-diffracted and shattered-making us feel how lovely it would be if all the fractured parts were united on a calm surface into one continuous picture. The merit, too, of the parts is various both in power and in versification. We do not think the rhymed hexameters are very effective. They appear to us to be forced and exotic, and do not readily acclimatise to the atmosphere of English poetry. Besides, as we have already observed, the rhythm is sometimes rough, if it is not actually imperfect, and the sentiment is unpoetic and commonplace, if it be not something worse than that-actually vulgar. These faults we would not tolerate in one of inferior abilities to Tennyson shall we receive them with complacency or condonation, because, in the caprice of an affluent and prodigal genius, he turns from richer food to feed on husks? From these we turn with delight to those portions in which, when he "comes to himself," he displays his incomparable gifts of pathos, and fancy, and melody, with unabated power, and feel that the Laureate is still as vigorous and as poetic as he was when we first listened to the charm of his song. Besides the tale of "Maud," the volume now under our consideration contains three or four smaller poems, all, we believe with one exception, now for the first time published. "The Brook" is one of those sweet idyls of rural life which Tennyson sings with such incomparable sweetness. It has much of the simplicity of "Dora," though not equal to it in pathos. Through the tale is interwoven at intervals the song of the Brook, the parts of which we will collect, so as to present it altogether :— "I come from haunts of coot and hern, "By thirty hills I hurry down, Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorps, a little town, And half a hundred bridges. "Till last by Philip's farm I flow, To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. "I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles; I bubble into eddying baysI babble on the pebbles. "With many a curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow; And many a fairy foreland set With willow-weed and mallow. "I chatter, chatter, as I flow To join the brimming river; For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. "I wind about, and in and out, With here a blossom sailing; And here and there a lusty trout, And here and there a grayling; "And here and there a foamy flake "And draw them all along, and flow "I steal by lawns and grassy plots, "I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, Among my skimming swallows; I make the netted sunbeam dance Against my sandy shallows. "I murmur under moon and stars "And out again I curve and flow To join the brimming river; It would be difficult to find anything sweeter than these lines. Their flow and cadence is perfect music-reminding us of the charming tuneful song in "The Miller's Daughter," which one can never read without a feeling of melody flooding the heart, as sunlight floods the sky in summer. We shall not say much in the way of criticism of the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington." It would come too late, seeing that the poem has been now some years before the public. This much, however, we may observe in passing, that it is not altogether worthy of the high fame of the dead, or of the living the great Duke, or the great poet. It is not |