of too marked a nature to be disposed of with so much nonchalance. Of all the successors of Shelley, he possesses the most 'sureness of insight. He has a subtle mind, of keen, passionless vision. His poetry is characterized by intellectual intensity as distinguished from the intensity of feeling. He watches his consciousness with a cautious and minute attention, to fix, and condense, and shape into form, the vague and mystical shadows of thought and feeling which glide and flit across it. He listens to catch the lowest whisperings of the soul. His imagination broods over the spiritual and mystical elements of his being with the most concentrated power. His eye rests firmly on an object until it changes from film into form. Some of his poems are forced into artis tical shape by the most patient and painful intellectual processes. His utmost strength is employed on those mysterious facts of consciousness which form the staple of the dreams and reveries of others. His mind winds through the mystical labyrinths of thought and feeling, with every power awake, in action, and wrought up to the highest pitch of intensity. The most acute analysis is followed, step by step, by a suggestive imagination, which converts refined abstractions into pictures, or makes them audible to the soul through the most cunning combinations of sound. Everything that is done is the result of labor. There is hardly a stanza in his writings but was introduced to serve some particular purpose, and could not be omitted without injury to the general effect. Everything has meaning. Every idea was won in a fair conflict with darkness, or dissonance, or gloom. The simplicity, the barrenness of ornament, in some of his lines, are as much the result of contrivance as his most splendid images. With what labor,

for instance, with what attentive watching of consciousness, must the following stanza have been wrought into shape:

"All those sharp fancies, by down-lapsing thought
Streamed onward, lost their edges, and did creep,

Rolled on each other, rounded, smoothed and brought
Into the gulfs of sleep."

This intense intellectual action is displayed in his delineations of nature and individual character, as well as in his subjective gropings into the refinements of his consciousness. In describing scenery, his microscopic eye and marvellously delicate ear are exercised to the utmost in detecting the minutest relations and most evanescent melodies of the objects before him, in order that his representation shall include everything which is important to their full perception. His pictures of English rural scenery, among the finest in the language, give the inner spirit as well as the outward form of the objects, and represent them, also, in their relation to the mind which is gazing on them. But nothing is spontaneous; the whole is wrought out elaborately by patient skill. The picture in his mind is spread out before his detecting and dissecting intellect, to be transferred to words only when it can be done with the most refined exactness, both as regards color, and form, and melody. He takes into calculation the nature of his subject, and decides whether it shall be definitely expressed in images, or indefinitely through tone, or whether both modes shall be combined. His object is expression, in its true sense; to reproduce in other minds the imagination or feeling which lies in his own; and he adopts the method which seems best calculated to effect it. He never will trust

himself to the impulses of passion, even in describing passion. All emotion, whether turbulent or evanescent, is passed through his intellect, and curiously scanned. To write furiously would to him appear as ridiculous, and as certainly productive of confusion, as to paint furiously, or carve furiously. We only appreciate his art when we consider that many of his finest conceptions and most sculptural images originally appeared in his consciousness as formless and mysterious emotions, having seemingly no symbols in nature or thought.

If our position is correct, then most certainly nothing can be more incorrect than to call any poem of Tennyson's unmeaning. Such a charge simply implies a lack in the critic's mind, not in the poet's. The latter always "means something in everything he writes; and the form in which it is embodied is chosen with the most careful deliberation. It seems to us that the purely intellectual element in Tennyson's poetry has been overlooked, owing perhaps to the fragility of some of his figures, and the dreaminess of outline apparent in others. Many think him to be a mere rhapsodist, fertile in nothing but a kind of melodious empiricism. No opinion is more contradicted by the fact. There are few authors who will bear the probe of analysis better.

The poetry of Tennyson is, moreover, replete with magnificent pictures, flushed with the finest hues of language, and speaking to the eye and the mind with the vividness of reality. We not only see the object, but feel the associations connected with it. His language is penetrated with imagination; and the felicity of his epithets, especially, leaves nothing to desire. "Godiva " combines simplicity of feeling with a subtle intensity of imagination, which remind us half of Chaucer and half

of Shelley. Like the generality of Tennyson's poems,
though short, it contains elements of interest capable of
being expanded into a much larger space. But the poem
which probably displays to the best advantage his variety
of power is "The Gardener's Daughter." It is flushed.
throughout with the most ethereal imagination, though
the incidents and emotions come home to the common
heart, and there is little appearance of elaboration in the
style. It is bathed in beauty-perfect as a whole, and
finished in the nicest details with consummate art.
There is a seeming copiousness of expression with a real
condensation; and the most minute threads of thought
and feeling,
so refined as to be overlooked in a care-
less perusal, yet all having relation to the general effect,
are woven into the texture of the style with the most
admirable felicity. "Locksley Hall," " Ænone," "The
May Queen," "Ulysses," "The Lotos-eaters," "The
Lady of Shalott," "Mariana," "Dora," "The Two
Voices," "The Dream of Fair Women," "The Palace
of Art," all different, all representing a peculiar phase
of nature or character, are still all characterized by the
cunning workmanship of a master of expression, giving
the most complete form to the objects which his keen
vision perceives. The melody of verse, which distin-
guishes all, ranging from the deepest organ tones to that

"Music which gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes,"

is also of remarkable beauty, and wins and winds its way to the very fountains of thought and feeling.

We extract a few of Tennyson's pictures, in illustration of his imaginative and artistical power. It will be seen that they are illustrations of moods of mind as well

as images of scenery; that they all bring with them a host of suggestive associations.

"For some were hung with arras green and blue,

Showing a gaudy summer-morn,

Where with puffed cheek the belted hunter blew
His wreathed bugle-horn.

"One seemed all dark and red-a tract of sand;
And some one pacing there alone,

Who paced forever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon.

"One showed an iron coast and angry waves,
You seemed to hear them climb and fall
And roar, rock-thwarted, under bellowing caves,
Beneath the windy wall.

"A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand,
Left on the shore- that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white."

"As in strange lands a traveller walking slow,

In doubt and great perplexity,

A little before moon rise hears the low

Moan of an unknown sea."

"For there was Milton, like a seraph strong,

Beside him Shakspeare bland and mild;
And there the world-worn Dante grasped his song,
And somewhat grimly smiled."

"So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land
Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way,

Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand
Torn from the fringe of spray."