The housewife's spindle whirling round, Now, wheeling round, with bootless skill, Thy bo-peep tail provokes thee still, As oft beyond thy curving side Its jetty tip is seen to glide; Like Madam in her tantrums high; Ah no! the start, the jet, the bound, These mock the deftliest rhymester's skill, The nimblest tumbler, stage-bedight, To thee is but a clumsy wight, For then, beneath some urchin's hand, And all their harmless claws disclose, Whence hast thou, then, thou witless puss, The magic power to charm us thus ? Is it, that in thy glaring eye An emblem, view'd with kindred eye, Ah! many a lightly-sportive child, Nor, when thy span of life be past, And children show, with glistening eyes, WELCOME BAT AND OWLET GRAY. O WELCOME bat and owlet gray, to A GREAT authority-William Wordsworth-his predecessor in the Laureateship—was among the earliest to estimate the genius of the poet who was destined to be his successor. Writing in 1845. Wordsworth says:-" He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and will live to give the world still better things." Twenty years have established the fame that was foreseen: the public voice with one accord has pronounced Alfred Tennyson to be the first of living poets. His poems are so thoroughly known, that any details concerning them are unnecessary; neither can it be needful to offer any comments on their merits; they have made their way to all hearts, and are read with delight by the old and the young. In the first edition of the "Book of Gems," we published some observations then presented to us by Leigh Hunt, whose star was setting when that of the young poet was rising. We cannot do better than reprint them, now that after the lapse of a quarter of a century the poet has become Poet Laureate and ranks high above all his peers. "Alfred Tennyson," Hunt writes, "is of the school of Keats; that is to say, it is difficult not to see that Keats has been a great deal in his thoughts; and that he delights in the same brooding over his sensations and the same melodious enjoyment of their expression. In his desire to communicate this music, he goes so far as to accent the final syllables in his participles passive, -as pleached, crowned, purple-spikéd, &c.,-with visible printers' marks, which subjects him, but erroneously, to a charge of pedantry; though it is a nicety not complimentary to the reader, and of which he may as well get rid. Much, however, as he reminds us of Keats, his genius is his own: he would have written poetry had his precursor written none; and he has, also, a vein of metaphysical subtlety, in which the other did not indulge, as may be seen by his verses entitled,' A Character,' those On the Confessions of a Sensitive Mind,' and numerous others. He is, also, a great lover of a certain home kind of landscape, which he delights to paint with a minuteness that, in the Moated Grange,' becomes affecting, and in the Miller's Daughter,' would remind us of the Dutch school, if it were not mixed up with the same deep feeling, though varied with a pleasant joviality.” Tennyson entered life under auspicious circumstances; his father was a clergyman, and in his parsonage that of Somerby, near Spilsby the poet was born, in the year 1809. He was entered of Trinity College, Cambridge. While a mere youth he published, in conjunction with his brother Charles, a volume of Poems; and he has been ever since continually before the public-adding to the laurels he had gained. A list of his printed works would now be a long one. It is worthy of note that two other brothers, Frederick and Septimus, as well as Charles, are authors of poems, of considerable merit: their fame has been eclipsed by that of the Laureate. Tennyson has mixed but little with "the world:" he resides in the Isle of Wight, and is happy in the domestic relations that so thoroughly sweeten and cheer the life of the student. Those who know him dwell with fervour on the estimable nature of the man. And it is certain that he adds another to the, happily, numerous examples of great men, in whom are combined the loftiest endowments of genius with the truest social and moral worth. In one of his minor poems he thus in part pictures his life in the garden of England:"Nor wholly in the busy world, nor quite Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love News from the humming city comes to it In sound of funeral or of marriage-Lells And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear The windy clanging of the minster clock, Although between it and the garden lies A league of grass, washed by a slow broad stream Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge At the Commemoration of 1855, the University of Oxford, "giving expression to the universal foeling of England," conferred on the Poet the honorary Degree of D.C.L. And some time afterwards, the Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, "endorsing the judgment of the sister University," placed a bust of him in the vestibule of their library. He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak, Rocking with shattered spars, with sudden fires Flamed over; at Trafalgar yet once more We taught him: late he learned humility, Perforce, like those whom Gideon schooled with briars. |