O'er heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light,

When not a breath disturbs the deep

serene,

And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn

scene;

Around her throne the vivid planets roll, And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole,

O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,

And tip with silver ev'ry mountain's head; Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise,

A flood of glory bursts from all the skies: The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight,

Eye the blue vault and bless the useful light.

So many flames before proud Ilion blaze; And lighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays," &c.

It will be seen at once that Pope's theory of the duties of a translator is to improve on, Tennyson's to preserve, his original. And what shall we say of the sort of tinsel with which the former gilds the refined gold, or the somewhat coarse colours with which he paints the lily, of Homer's beautiful simplicity loading each substantive with an epithet, and piling up extraneous particulars, till Homer's nine lines have grown into sixteen; and till his night-piece (to the great loss of the reader) has been entirely replaced by Pope's? In Pope the fires have become beaming, the heavens azure, the moon the refulgent lamp of night, without the slightest authority. Nonsense is talked about the planets, which are set rolling round the moon after a fashion strange alike to the peasant and the philosopher. The stars perform functions as unknown to Homer as to us; apparently darting yellow and silvery rays alternately, according to unknown chemical affinities with the objects on which they fall. But where is the crowning glory of the passage, the ἄσπετος αἰθὴρ of Homer? shut out from our view by the hard, metallic, blue vault which Pope's conscious swains eye; conscious it

It is

Now

is hard to say of what, but perhaps of the fine stage-illumination provided for them; and having eyed, proceed to bless for the useful light it affords them. A great improvement, forsooth, on Homer's lonely shepherd, unconsciously made glad, in his rustic simpleness, by the starry heavens, without stopping to ask of what use they are to him! It is strange to see more ignorance of the aspects of nature in the writer of Sir Isaac Newton's epitaph, than in the oldest of profane authors. Assuredly the generation for whom Pope composed this fancy picture could have cared little for natural beauty. turn to Tennyson's version. just one line longer than its original: no longer at all, considering the different length of the lines. It attempts the insertion of no new beauties; but how felicitously does it preserve those which exist! How little does it spill of the noble Chian wine in the dangerous transference from goblet to goblet! There is one point we feel scarcely satisfied upon the very unusual position of the verb gladden, here turned from an active to an intransitive. It seems to us peculiarly a translator's business to employ the English which exists, and not

It is

Hellenic eye gazed fondly, but as yet uncritically, on the beauteous forms which stood around it; when Homer sang the loves and hates of gods and goddesses, without troubling himself, like Pindar and Euripides, to make their doings agree with any ideal standard. The tears of Zeus for Sarpedon in the 'Iliad' justify these which Eos sheds for Tithonus. (Not to mention that no god has a better right to tears than dewy Morn.) For the Eos of Tennyson is the Homeric Eos seen closer. In the 'Iliad' we view her from afar; her rosy fingers unbarring the eastern portals; her saffron garments brightening the sky. Tennyson admits us into

"The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn,"

to paint her nearer in those exquisite lines in which Tithonus says:

"Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals

From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,

And bosom beating with a heart renew'd. Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the

his prayer for death, thrill us by their tones of hopeless anguish; as they contrast the goddess in her immortal beauty with the man who shrinks even from her loved presence that he may hide his sorrows in that grave, which he yet loves to think she will visit with regretful looks. How they paint in their Homeric simplicity that weary spirit which finds all its former joys turned to wormwood, and now can only long for death :—

"Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet

Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the

steam

Floats up from those dim fields about the homes

Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows of the happier dead. Release me, and restore me to the ground; Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:

Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by

morn;

I earth in earth forget these empty courts,

And thee returning on thy silver wheels."

We are inclined to give a very high place indeed to this beautiful poem (shall we say the highest?) among the Laureate's compositions on classical subjects. Not that we are insensible to the deep thought in his 'Ulysses,' to the rich loveliness of his 'Enone,' or to the varied melody of his 'Lotos-Eaters;' but that his Tithonus' seems to us to exclude the intrusion of alien ideas even more perfectly than they do, and to reach, if possible, a greater height of poetic beauty.

There are several standards by which the later poems of an author may be tried, who occupies the position held by Mr Tennyson. They may be regarded as materials for forming the judgment which is to assign their writer his permanent niche in the Temple of Fame; and, with this view, compared with poems in similar styles to themselves of many ages and of many lands. But such a proceeding would be premature. For the verdicts of contemporaries on the poets of their era are always very liable to be reversed by posterity. Like those who dwell at

the foot of high mountains, our nearness to men of very great genius hinders us, while they live among us, from estimating their full height. On the other hand, the same cause adds to the stature of genius of an inferior order. These things are set right to succeeding generations. The farther off they.grow, the more they lose sight of all greatness which is not supereminent, and the higher what really is so towers to their view. Again, at most periods a comparison may be instituted between the works of one great poet and those of others living like himself, and an attempt made to fix, not his place among the poets of all times, but amongst those who adorn his own. For the reason just given, such an undertaking is always apt to be as unsatisfactory as it is invidious; and, after our own opening remarks, it will certainly not be expected from us. We must, therefore, have recourse to another and a very natural standard of comparison; that, namely, with which the expectations raised by previous works of the same author furnish us. And then the subject for our consideration narrows into the following question: Is this volume equal to those which have gone before it? Is it worthy of its author? To the last of these two queries we answer with little hesitation, Yes. Not that the subjects of these latest poems are so grand as some of those which inspired the Laureate in former days. Not that we should not vastly have preferred (what we hope yet to receive from his pen) a fresh series of pictures from the legends of King Arthur; but that these later themes are treated with unabated force, and that the power displayed in handling them is more equal in its exercise than of old. We dare not say that there is anything in the book we are closing which impresses the mind with such a sense of re

verent admiration as do the finest parts of 'Guinevere;' but neither is there anything in it puerile and spasmodic, like the worst parts of 'Maud;' or weak, as certain passages in 'Enid.'

The simple pathos and freedom from straining after effect of 'Enoch Arden;' the solemn seriousness of the conclusion of Aylmer's Field;' the sweet music to which the 'SeaDreams' are set, no less than the unexpected might of satire developed in that short poem, leave a sense of great satisfaction in the mind. Still (may we confess it?) we could bear the loss of all these better than we could that of several we might mention among Mr Tennyson's earlier poems-infinitely better than we could endure to lose the two last of the 'Idylls of the King.' For we should not feel in the former, as we should in the latter case, that unique types of beauty had been taken from us. Not such is the feeling with which we regard 'Tithonus.' It inspires us with a deeper sense of admiring love than do its fellows. In its perfection alike of form and colouring, it affects us as do the mournful glories of the autumu woods, or the setting sunbeams of a day at whose dying we are moved to weep. It is of poems like 'Tithonus' that the words are emphatically true-" A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." It, at least, may its author bequeath to succeeding generations with little fear that they will regard it with less admiration than that with which his contemporaries behold it now—an admiration filled by which we close this volume, saying (not for the first time) that, whether we consider the gifts bestowed on its author, or the use to which he puts them, we have reason to render thanks that we have lived to hear such a poet sing, and that we may hope to live to hear him sing yet again.

RELIGION has in all ages been the noblest inspiration of Art. The truths which came from God and led to God, which served as a guide upon earth, and spake of a glory in heaven, quickened the soul of the artist to lofty conception. And thus, if the highest forms of art have risen around all religions, so far as in them dwelt the universal light, we can easily understand how much more glorious were those manifestations which sprang from a revelation perfect in truth, pure in beauty, and untainted in goodness. The nations of the heathen world reached, perhaps, the utmost civilisation compatible with the holding of dogmas corrupt and malevolent. And so their national arts received even mighty development, and then stopped short, arrested, as humanity itself, in the path towards ultimate perfection. Thus in Egypt the arts were stayed in icy petrifaction; in Assyria, sculpture did not rise above rude naturalism; and even in Greece, unsurpassed to this day at least in plastic art, the sculptor was content to rest in the ideal of physical form. It was reserved, then, for a more perfect religion to give to art, even as it extended to the human race, the possibility of a higher and a wider development. And just as history in divers nations had prepared for the advent of the new revelation, so did the arts known to the Old World stand around the cradle and watch the growth of the new-born art of Christendom. It has been said that the Jews preserved the knowledge of the true God, that the Greeks sowed the seeds of a divine philosophy, that the Romans laid the foundations of universal empire, and that thus the

world was made ready for the coming of Christ. And so, in like manner, was the earth tempered and moulded for Christian art. The Roman Empire, where the fury of the north mingled with the fire of the south and the light of the east, gave first to pagan, and then to Christian art, the wide diffusion of universal dominion. The Greeks, with whom beauty had grown into religion, in like manner imparted to the successive arts of the pagan and Christian world a subtle symmetry of form. And then, coming to Judea, not to be forgotten are the grand revelations which neither sculptor nor painter had ventured to touch-the inheritance handed down from patriarchs, traditions stretching through the dim distance from out the times when God spake with man; then, too, must be remembered the cloud of witnesses, who spake of the glory which should be revealed; then, likewise, must live in memory Moses, who stood face to face before Jehovah in the mount-Isaiah, whose torch of prophecy still burns through the far-off ages-and the Psalmist King whose harp reverberates in every land,-all these must be remembered when we recount the heritage showered so richly upon Christian art. And thus it was, when the Roman Empire had broken down, when the Greek philosophy had confessed to foolishness, that there came from the cradle of Bethlehem, there arose from the sepulchre of the Catacombs, a power, a wisdom, and a matchless beauty to crown the art of Christendom.

We have said that art has ever taken its noblest inspiration from religion. The reason of this is obvious. Religion is itself an inspira