after she knew the truth, she would often dwell on their mysterious meaning, and on how she had failed to apprehend it till too late. And thus these judicious touches of the supernatural make the tale in which they occur seem additionally natural and life-like. But if the Laureate thus knows how to deal with the unwarranted beliefs of the simple, and how to extract from them poetic embellishment, he also knows how to make a noble use of their religious faith. The grandest and most poetical book in the English language lies as open to the poor as to the rich; and is often more deeply pondered by the former than by the latter. And it is not too much to say that some of the most beautiful passages in 'Enoch Arden' are those in which Holy Scripture is reverently quoted. Not to refer again to Annie's dream; how fine, for instance, are the quotations from the Bible in Enoch's homely farewell to her!— "Annie, my girl, cheer up, be comforted; Look to the babes, and till I come again Keep everything ship-shape, for I must Is He not yonder in those uttermost To the first nautical phrase we indeed strongly object. In real life men do not delight in the slang of their calling as much as books make them do-least of all in their most solemn moments. We hope to see ship-shape omitted in future editions. But who can fail to admire the rest of the speech? or to notice how the way in which the sailor's voice, resting on the pause in the psalm he had weekly chanted, symbolises, as nothing else could do, his soul's repose on the, to him, all-consoling truth which it contains? Curious felicities of expression of this sort occur often in the poem. We mean words which exactly render the thought, so arranged that their sound echoes, or forms a musical accompaniment to it. Of this the lines describing Annie's second marriage (quoted some way back) are an instance. The wedding-bells ring in the first two lines. Those which succeed run heavily with the weight of foreboding which they carry. Of the same sort is the description (earlier still in the poem) of the death of Annie's little one : * The idea of life escaping like a bird is indeed old, as most beautiful ideas are; but the music of the lines (the hurried rhythm of the last one denoting the mother's anxiety, its abrupt conclusion how the little heart suddenly ceases to beat, and then the pause after it betokening the mother's sorrow) is Mr Tennyson's own.t There is another secret of the Laureate's strength-one which has been often pointed out before-observable in the poem we are considering. The way in which he suits his background of landscape to the figures in his foreground, and so pictures the aspects of nature as seen by a human eye and felt by a human * "Thou, as a bird escapes, art vanished from me; Ορνις γὰρ ὥς τις ἐκ χερῶν ἄφαντος εἶ, πήδημ ̓ ἐς "Αιδου κραιπνὸν ὁρμήσασά μοι. -Eur. Hip. 829. The "flitting" soul recalls to our mind Mr Merivale's admirable translation of the dying emperor's address to his own. quoting it here: "Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quæ nunc abibis in loca,Pallidula, rigida, nudulaNec, ut soles, dabis jocos?", We may earn some reader's thanks by "Soul of mine, pretty one, flitting one, Never to play again, never to play?" He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever heard a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees. No sail from day to day, but every day Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east; The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again How pitilessly must these glories have seemed to mock the solitary captive's anguish ! How natural it is that visions of home should haunt his loneliness, presenting to him things most unlike his present abode: "The chill November dawns, and dewy-glooming downs, The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves, And the low moan of leaden-coloured seas!" The dead weight of the dead leaf bore it down: Thicker the drizzle grew, deeper the gloom." The former picture derives its significance from contrast, this latter one from resemblance; for the seafog which swallows up the sunshine is emblematic of the disappointment which awaits the bright hopes of Enoch's return. Were we writing of an author not yet known to fame, it would be as right as it would be pleasant to make long extracts from the concluding portion of the poem. But when reviewing a work which every one praises, which everybody has bought, and which it is therefore fair to suppose that every one (but those whose aversion to poetry is invincible) has read, it is needless to extract any passages which are not required to make the critic's remarks intelligible. We may therefore briefly record our admiration for the sustained power and absence of maudlin sensibility with which the last scenes of Enoch Arden' are put before us. They are very pathetic; and they are never foolishly sentimental. The way in which Enoch is stunned by the news of his wife's second marriage; himself that she is happy; the pichis longing to see her, and assure ture of peace and comfort within Philip's house, which throws into stronger relief the anguish of the wretched husband and father as he stands without; Enoch's grand (if not strictly just) self-sacrifice, as, recovering from the shock of seeing what only to hear of had been woe sufficient, he repeats his resolution to himself, "Not to tell her, never to let her know:" all these things in the hands of a French writer, aiming at the déchirant and the larmoyant, would have been morbidly painful. Mr Tennyson so tells them that they elevate our minds by the sight of a spirit refining to its highest perfection in the purgatorial fires of earth. Three similes in this part of the poem deserve especial notice. For merly often, and occasionally still, the Laureate has been known to indulge himself in a clever simile which, by its far-fetched air, suggests that the subject was made for it, and not it for the subject. But it is not so here. How finely appropriate it is to liken the attraction which his "lost wife's fireside" exercises on the returned sailor, to "the beacon blaze," which " allures "The bird of passage, till he madly strikes Against it, and beats out his weary life!"* Again, after Enoch's heroic determination, we are told that "Prayer from a living source within the will, And beating up through all the bitter world, Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, Kept him a living soul." And when his year of hopeless toil and living death has done its work, we read of him that "No gladlier does the stranded wreck See thro' the gray skirts of a lifting squall The boat that bears the hope of life approach, To save the life despair'd of, than he saw Death dawning on him, and the close of all." These three images are all good in themselves; but they derive an especial excellence from the fact, that they occur in a tale of seaadventure, narrated on a sea-beach. And when Enoch's lips, unsealed by approaching death, reveal his secret to his humble attendant, how few are the lines which set before us that contrast which sounds with such thrilling power in Job's long lamentation! the man as he once was, and the man such as calamity has made him— "Did you know Enoch Arden of this town?' 'Know him?' she said; 'I knew him far away. Held his head high, and cared for no man, he.' Slowly and sadly Enoch answer'd her, His head is low, and no man cares for him. I think I have not three days more to live; I am the man.' The dying man's last victory over selfishness (when, forbidding the woman to fetch his children, he sends to them and to his wife the loving messages which it might grieve them too much to hear from his own lips), bespeaks not merely our pity for him, but our reverence. There is also something profoundly sad in the way in which that desolate heart, after half-claiming back the living children, feels that, in real fact, only the dead little one is left it : "And now there is but one of all my blood, Who will embrace me in the world-to-be." But his last words give us comfort: "He woke, he rose, he spread his arms abroad, Crying with a loud voice, 'A sail! a sail! I am saved; and so fell back and spoke no more.' For they tell us that what he prayed for in those long years of banishment, to which his mind has wandered back, has come at last the ship to take him to the true Haven: and that the exile has at length been fetched home. There, in our judgment, the poem should have ended. Its author, thinking differently, adds : And when they buried him the little port "So past the strong heroic soul away. Had seldom seen a costlier funeral." What need of the first of these lines? What need to tell us that the noble fisherman was strong and Contrast the same simile in 'The Princess,' where Ida is said to stand "Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves Of tempest, when the crimson-rolling eye Not to speak of the disproportion between the terror raised by these words and the small amount of " ruin which ensues, the image seems a violent one to apply to a beautiful girl, however steadfast in her anger! heroic, when the poet has just completed his fine delineation of his strength and heroism? And what need of the two last? The costly funeral sounds an impertinent intrusion. We cannot doubt for a moment that Philip gave honourable burial to the man whom he had so deeply, though so unwittingly, wronged. But the atonement is such a poor one, that it looks like a mockery; and we would rather hear nothing of it. Why disturb in our minds the image which what went before had left there-the humble bed on which the form, so often tempest-tossed, reposes in its last sleep; the white face, serene in death, waiting for the kisses which it might not receive in life. "Ciò che'l viver non ebbe, abbia la morte." Obeying that attraction to the sea which 'Enoch Arden' leaves behind it, we feel inclined next to cast a passing glance at the 'Sea Dreams.' As Theocritus, in one of his idyls, gives us the talk of two townswomen of his own day, hastening to a festival, so here the Laureate records for our edification the far weightier sayings of two townspeople of our time, during the festive rest from toil which a visit to the sea-side affords them. A stern critic might, indeed, find fault with them as somewhat too magniloquent. He might ask whether it is not incongruous for a city clerk (however superior to city clerks in general) to complain of his treacherous friend in such Shakspearean terms as the following: as the clerk's worthy wife proves herself by her rejoinder : "He that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd." While praising the clever imitation of the satire of the eighteenth century, with which the clerk brands the hypocrite who has wronged him (the two first lines of which might be sworn to as Pope's any day), he might yet pertinaciously beg to be informed how a satire of the presumed date could contain a reference to Bible-meetings :— "With all his conscience and one eye askew, So false, he partly took himself for true. Nor deeds of gift, but gifts of grace he forged, And, snake-like, slimed his victim ere he gorged; And oft at Bible-meetings, o'er the rest Dropping the too rough H in Hell and To spread the word by which himself had thriven." And, lastly, he might point at the pomp of gorgeous language in which the two dreams are told, as a reckless expenditure of poetic wealth, alike unsuited to the occasion and to the persons who employ it. Nor can we deny that there would be some truth in these observations. But we might reply, and we do, that in like manner our old friends Tityrus and Menalcas are more polite and more poetical than the shepherds of actual life; and that if the clerk chose to pass off his own composition as an "old satire," he had a right (poetically speaking) to do so. Indeed, what reasonable liberties can we forbid a man to take, who has enriched our stock of quotations with such a saying as this: "How many will say, 'Forgive,' and find A sort of absolution in the sound To hate a little longer?" Or this, which we like still better:"Is it so true that second thoughts are best? Not first, and third, which are a riper first " We can find no fault, and only wish for ourselves visions as fair when next we sleep beside the sea as those two dreams; in the last of which we seem to hear the musical roar of the swelling tide so plainly : "But round the North, a light, A belt, it seem'd of luminous vapour, lay, And ever in it a low musical note Swell'd up and died; and as it swell'd, a ridge Of breaker issued from the belt, and still Grew with the growing note, and when the note Had reach'd a thunderous fullness, on those cliff's Broke, mixt with awful light. And then the great ridge drew, Lessening to the lessening music, back, And pass'd into the belt and swell'd again Slowly to music." 6 The Laureate's reputation rests on few firmer pillars than are afforded it by some of the monologues among his earlier poems. It is natural, therefore, to turn with eager expectation to the three in his new volume. The third most amply satisfies; the two first do not altogether disappoint it. No one of the three is (like 'Locksley Hall' and the greater part of 'St Simeon Stylites') a soliloquy. Nor is any one of them like the conclusion of their author's Ulysses,' an address to an audience, numerous though mute. They are each, as are several of his other monologues, spoken to a single hearer. As the mother in the 'Queen of May,' so in the Grandmother,' the little girl is the only listener. Eos alone hearkens to the lamentations of "Tithonus,' as mother Ida to those of 'Enone;' and the Northern Farmer' gives the whole benefit of his strange experience to the person who fills the unenviable place of his sick-nurse. There are two principal dangers incurred in composing a monologue. The one that of rendering it, like an Euripidean prologue, a conventional narration of facts by a person who has no sufficient reason for rehearsing them, apart from the dramatic necessity of making them known to the audience. Mr Tennyson has avoided this first peril with his usual success. His Farmer has no long history to relate. That of Tithonus may be safely supposed already known. And the Grandmother has a right to tell as much as she pleases of her own story; both because her young auditor cannot know much of it, and because it is the privilege of old age to be garrulous. The second, and greater difficulty, is one which the writer of the monologue has to overcome in common with the dramatist. He must preserve the propriety of its speaker's character throughout. He must not suffer him to reflect on his own case with the sharp-sightedness of a by stander. Nor must he make him think aloud (unless in some exceptional cases of overmastering feeling); for that would be to confound the monologue with the soliloquy. Now we think that 'Tithonus' will be found (the exception stated being allowed) to satisfy these conditions. In 'The Northern Farmer' we seem to discover one or two slight inconsistencies. At least he quotes the Psalms very correctly for a man who by his own account had such faint perceptions of what went on in church during his attendance there. And, though the boldness with which he questions the dealings of Providence towards himself is conceivable as the thought of the mind, it seems hardly so when it finds expression in words. A greater authority than Mr Tennyson tells us that when the fool said, "There is no God," he said it in his heart. Surely when a yet greater fool owns God, and nevertheless presumes to blame the wisdom of His appointments, it will be done in his heart too! There is, however, something very masterly in the life-like sketch of the man, with which his discourse furnishes us. The subject is painful, but it is very cleverly treated. How fine are the touches which set him before us in his imperturbable selfsatisfaction, as he reflects on his landlord's confidence, the "qua |