been a man remarkable for strength and stature, and for the energetic force of his character. This gentleman had a family of eleven or twelve children, seven of whom were sons.

The eldest three we have mentioned were all educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, pupils of Dr Whewell. Alfred was born in the parsonage of Somersby (near Spilsby) in 1810. In 1829, he gained the Chancellor's medal for the English prize poem, his subject being Timbuctoo. Previous to this, in conjunction with his brother Charles, he published anonymously a small volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers. In 1830 appeared Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson. This volume contained poems since altered and incorporated in later collections. These early productions had the faults of youthful genius-irregularity, indistinctness of conception, florid puerilities, and occasional affectation. In such poems, however, as Mariana, Recollections of the Arabian Nights, and Claribel, it was obvious that a true original poet had arisen. In 1833, Mr Tennyson issued another volume, shewing an advance in poetical power and in variety of style, though the collection met with severe treatment from the critics. nine years the poet continued silent. In 1842, he reappeared with Poems, in two volumes-this third series being a reprint of some of the pieces in the former volumes considerably altered, with many new poems, including the most striking and popular of all his productions. These were of various classes-fragments of legendary chivalrous story, as Morte d'Arthur, Godiva, &c.; or pathetic and beautiful, as The May Queen and Dora; or impassioned love-poems, as The Gardener's Daughter, The Miller's Daughter, The Talking Oak, and Locksley Hall. The last is the most finished of Tennyson's works, full of passionate grandeur and intensity of feeling and imagination. It partly combines the energy and impetuosity of Byron with the pictorial beauty and melody of Coleridge. The lover of Locksley Hall is ardent, generous, and noble-minded, 'nourishing a youth sublime' with lofty aspirations and dreams of felicity. His passion is at first returned:

Extracts from 'Locksley Hall.'

For

and

Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands;

Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;

There is a marvellous brilliancy of colouring and force of sentiment and expression in this poem, while the versification is perfect. The ballad strains of Tennyson, and particularly his musical Oriana, also evince consummate art; and when he is purely descriptive, nothing can exceed the minute fidelity with which he paints the English landscape. The poet having shifted his residence from Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight, his scenepainting partook of the change. The following is from his Gardener's Daughter:

Not 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 bells;
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies

was a Lincolnshire squire, owner of Bayons Manor and Usselby Hall-properties afterwards held by the poet's uncle, the Right Hon. Charles Tennyson D'Eyncourt, who assumed the name of D'Eyncourt to commemorate his descent from that ancient Norman family, and in compliance with a condition attached to the possession of certain manors and estates. The eldest of the laureate's brothers, Frederick, is author of a volume of poemsgraceful, but without any original distinctive character-entitled Days and Hours, 1854. Charles, the second brother, who joined with Alfred, as stated above, in the composition of a volume of verse, became vicar of Grassby, Lincolnshire, in 1835. He took the name of Turner, on succeeding to a property in Lincolnshire. In 1864, he published a volume of Sonnets.

A careless ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down-

looked very pretty, and thoroughly English. In another verse of the poem from which I have quoted-the invitation to the Rev. F. D. Maurice-he exactly describes the situation of Farringford:

For groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter, stand;
And further on, the hoary channel

Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand.

4

Every one well acquainted with Tennyson's writings will have noticed how the spirit of the scenery which he has depicted has changed from the glooming flats,' the 'level waste,' where 'stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,' which were the reflex of his Lincolnshire observation, to the beautiful meadow and orchard, thoroughly English ruralities of The Gardener's Daughter and The Brook. Many glimpses in the neighbourhood of Farringford will call to mind descriptive passages in these lastnamed poems.-Letter in the Daily News. The laureate has also an estate in Surrey (Aldworth, Haslemere), to which he retreats when the tourists and admirers become oppressive in the Isle of Wight.

A league of grass, washed by a slow broad stream,
That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge
Crowned with the minster towers.

The fields between

Are dewy-fresh, browsed by deep-uddered kine,
And all about the large lime feathers low,
The lime a summer home of murmurous wings.

The poet, while a dweller amidst the fens of Lincolnshire, painted morasses, quiet meres, and sighing reeds. The exquisitely modulated poem of The Dying Swan affords a picture drawn, we think, with wonderful delicacy:

Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows;

One willow over the river wept,
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will;
And far through the marish green and still,
The tangled water-courses slept,

Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.

'O yes; she wandered round and round
These knotted knees of mine,
And found, and kissed the name she found,
And sweetly murmured thine.

'A tear-drop trembled from its source, And down my surface crept.

My sense of touch is something coarse, But I believe she wept.

"Then flushed her cheek with rosy light;
She glanced across the plain;
But not a creature was in sight:
She kissed me once again.

'Her kisses were so close and kind,
That, trust me on my word,
Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind,
But yet my sap was stirred:

'And even into my inmost ring

A pleasure I discerned,

Like those blind motions of the Spring, That shew the year is turned..

'I, rooted here among the groves, But languidly adjust

My vapid vegetable loves

With anthers and with dust:

'For ah! my friend, the days were brief Whereof the poets talk,

When that, which breathes within the leaf, Could slip its bark and walk.

'But could I, as in times foregone,

From spray, and branch, and stem, Have sucked and gathered into one The life that spreads in them,

'She had not found me so remiss;

But lightly issuing through,

I would have paid her kiss for kiss,
With usury thereto.'

O flourish high, with leafy towers,
And overlook the lea;
Pursue thy loves among the bowers,
But leave thou mine to me.

O flourish, hidden deep in fern,
Old oak, I love thee well;

A thousand thanks for what I learn,

And what remains to tell.

And the poet, in conclusion, promises to praise the mystic tree even more than England honours his brother-oak,

Wherein the younger Charles abode

Till all the paths were dim,

And far below the Roundhead rode,

And hummed a surly hymn.

The last two lines furnish a finished little picture. Still more dramatic in effect is the portrait of the heroine of Coventry.

Godiva.

She sought her lord, and found him, where he strode About the hall, among his dogs, alone.

She told him of their tears,

And prayed him, 'If they pay this tax, they starve.' Whereat he stared, replying, half amazed, 'You would not let your little finger ache

For such as these?'-'But I would die,' said she.

He laughed, and swore by Peter and by Paul:
Then filliped at the diamond in her ear;
'O ay, ay, ay, you talk!'-'Alas!' she said,
'But prove me what it is I would not do.'
And from a heart as rough as Esau's hand,

He answered: 'Ride you naked through the town,
And I repeal it;' and nodding as in scorn,
He parted, with great strides among his dogs.
So left alone, the passions of her mind-
As winds from all the compass shift and blow-
Made war upon each other for an hour,
Till pity won. She sent a herald forth,
And bade him cry, with sound of trumpet, all
The hard condition; but that she would loose
The people: therefore, as they loved her well,
From then till noon no foot should pace the street,
No eye look down, she passing; but that all
Should keep within, door shut, and window barred.
Then fled she to her inmost bower, and there
Unclasped the wedded eagles of her belt,
The grim Earl's gift; but ever at a breath
She lingered, looking like a summer moon
Half-dipt in cloud: anon she shook her head,
And showered the rippled ringlets to her knee;
Unclad herself in haste; adown the stair
Stole on; and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid
From pillar unto pillar, until she reached
The gateway; there she found her palfrey trapt
In purple blazoned with armorial gold.

Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity:
The deep air listened round her as she rode,
And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.
The little wide-mouthed heads upon the spouts
Had cunning eyes to see: the barking cur
Made her cheek flame: her palfrey's footfall shot
Light horrors through her pulses: the blind walls
Were full of chinks and holes ; and overhead
Fantastic gables, crowding, stared: but she
Not less through all bore up, till, last, she saw
The white-flowered elder-thicket from the field
Gleam through the Gothic archways in the wall.
Then she rode back, clothed on with chastity:
And one low churl, compact of thankless earth,
The fatal byword of all years to come,
Boring a little auger-hole in fear,
Peeped-but his eyes, before they had their will,
Were shrivelled into darkness in his head,

And dropt before him. So the Powers, who wait
On noble deeds, cancelled a sense misused;
And she, that knew not, passed: and all at once,
With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless

noon

Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers,
One after one: but even then she gained
Her bower; whence reissuing, robed and crowned,
To meet her lord, she took the tax away,
And built herself an everlasting name.

Lo! in the middle of the wood,
The folded leaf is wooed from out the bud
With winds upon the branch, and there
Grows green and broad, and takes no care,
Sun-steeped at noon, and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.

Lo! sweetened with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted length of days,
The flower ripens in its place,

Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil. . . .

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb..
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful

ease.

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream!...
To hear each other's whispered speech;
Eating the lotos day by day,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy,

Heaped over with a mound of grass,

Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

The most prominent defects in these volumes of Mr Tennyson were occasional quaintness and obscurity of expression, with some incongruous combinations of low and familiar with poetical images. His next work, The Princess, a Medley, appeared in December 1847. This is a story of a prince and princess contracted by their parents without having seen each other. The lady repudiates the alliance; but after a series of adventures and incidents as improbable and incoherent as the plots of some of the old wild Elizabethan tales and dramas, the princess relents and surrenders. The mixture of modern ideas and manners with those of the age of chivalry and romance-the attempted amalgamation of the conventional with the real,

Princess truly a medley, and produces an unpleasing grotesque effect. Parts of the poem, however, are sweetly written; there are subtle touches of thought and satire, and some exquisite lyrical passages. Tennyson has nothing finer than these stanzas:

The Lotos-eaters.

Why are we weighed upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,

Still from one sorrow to another thrown. . . .

Song, The Splendour Falls.
The splendour falls on castle walls,
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

The poet's philosophy as to the sexes is thus summed up:

For woman is not undeveloped man,

But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet love were slain : his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.

Yet in the long years liker must they grow;

The man be more of woman, she of man;

He gain in sweetness and in moral height,

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world:
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words.

In 1850 appeared, at first anonymously, In Memoriam, a volume of short poems, divided into sections, but all devoted, like the Sonnets of Shakspeare, to one beloved object-a male friend. Mr Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, and affianced to Mr Tennyson's sister, died at Vienna in 1833, and his memory is here embalmed in a series of remarkable and affecting poems, no less than one hundred and twenty-nine in number, and all in the same stanza. This sameness of subject and versification would seem to render the work monotonous and tedious; so minute a delineation of personal sorrow is also apt to appear unmanly and unnatural. But the poet, though adhering to one melancholy theme, clothes it in all the hues of imagination and intellect. He lifts the veil, as it were, from the inner life of the soul; he stirs the deepest and holiest feelings of our nature; he describes, reasons, and allegorises; flowers are intermingled with the cypress, and faith and hope brighten the vista of the future. His vast love and sympathy seem to embrace all nature as assimilated with his lost friend.

Thy voice is on the rolling air;

I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.

The ship containing his friend's remains is thus beautifully apostrophised:

In Memoriam, IX.

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore,
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur's loved remains,
Spread thy full wings and waft him o'er.

So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirrored mast, and lead
Through prosperous floods his holy urn.
All night no ruder air perplex

Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright As our pure love, through early light Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above;
Sleep gentle heavens before the prow;
Sleep gentle winds as he sleeps now,
My friend, the brother of my love!
My Arthur, whom I shall not see

Till all my widowed race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.

Arthur Hallam was interred in Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, situated on a still and sequestered spot, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel:*

The Danube to the Severn gave

The darkened heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,

And in the hearing of the wave.

There twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by,

And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.

We add one of the sections, in which description of external nature is finely blended with the mourner's reminiscences:

In Memoriam, XXII.

The path by which we twain did go,

Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
Through four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow:
And we with singing cheered the way,

And crowned with all the season lent,
From April on to April went,
And glad at heart from May to May:
But where the path we walked began

To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended following hope,
There sat the Shadow feared of man;
Who broke our fair companionship,

And spread his mantle dark and cold;
And wrapt thee formless in the fold,
And dulled the murmur on thy lip,
And bore thee where I could not see

Nor follow, though I walk in haste;
And think that, somewhere in the waste,
The Shadow sits and waits for me.

Winter scenes are described; Christmas, with its train of sacred and tender associations, comes; but the poet is in a new home :

Our father's dust is left alone
And silent under other snows.

With the genial season, however, his sympathies expand, and in one section of noble verse he sings the dirge of the old year and the advent of the

new:

In Memoriam, CVI.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

* Memoir prefixed to Arthur Hallam's Remains, by his father, the historian. An interesting account of this volume is given by Dr John Brown, Edinburgh, in Hora Subseciva. Arthur Henry Hallam was born in London, February 1, 1811. He distinguished himself at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was author of several essays and poetical productions, which gave promise of future excellence. He died in his twenty-third year, September 15, 1833.