vividly describes what she felt when, left an orphan by her father having been also taken away, and sent for by his relations, she first looked upon her new country with her native one fresh in her memory :—

The train swept us on.

Was this my father's England? the great isle?
The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship
Of verdure, field from field, as man from man;
The skies themselves looked low and positive,
As almost you could touch them with a hand,
And dared to do it they were so far off

From God's celestial crystals; all things blurred,
And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates
Absorb the light here ?-not a hill or stone

With heart to strike a radiant colour up

Or active outline on the indifferent air.

Gradually, however, she comes to appreciate something of the tamer landscape :—

Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woods
Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs
To the precipices. Not my headlong leaps
Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear
In leaping through the palpitating pines,
Like a white soul tossed out to eternity
With thrills of time upon it. Not indeed
My multitudinous mountains, sitting in
The magic circle, with the mutual touch
Electric, panting from their full deep hearts
Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for
Communion and commission. Italy

Is one thing, England one.

On English ground,
You understand the letter-ere the fall

How Adam lived in a garden. All the fields
Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;
The hills are crumpled plains, the plains parterres,
The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped,
And if you seck for any wilderness

You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed
And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,
Which does not awe you with its claws and beak

Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,
But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of
Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pause
Of finer meditation.

Rather say,

A sweet familiar nature, stealing in

As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand
Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so
Of presence and affection, excellent

For inner uses, from the things without.

Ere long her heart opens to it all :—

Whoever lives true life will love true love.
I learnt to love that England. Very oft,
Before the day was born, or otherwise
Through secret windings of the afternoons,
I threw my hunters off and plunged myself
Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag
Will take the waters, shivering with the fear
And passion of the course. And when at last
Escaped, so many a green slope built on slope
Betwixt me and the enemy's house behind,
I dared to rest, or wander, in a rest
Made sweeter for the step upon the grass,
And view the ground's most gentle dimplement,
(As if God's finger touched but did not press
In making England) such an up and down
Of verdure, nothing too much up or down,
A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;
Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew,—at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade,-
I thought my father's land was worthy too
Of being my Shakspeare's.

Equally brilliant and cordial with this picture of English nature is this other of the artificial in France (whatever may be exactly the meaning of some parts of it). We give the passage as rewritten, and very considerably altered from its original form, for the fourth edition of the poem :

I mused

Up and down, up and down, the terraced streets,
The glittering boulevards, the white colonnades
Of fair fantastic Paris, who wears trees
Like plumes, as if man made them, spire and tower
As if they had grown by nature, tossing up
Her fountains in the sunshine of the squares,
As if in beauty's game she tossed the dice,
Or blew the silver down-balls of her dreams
To sow futurity with seeds of thought
And count the passage of her festive hours.

The city swims in verdure, beautiful

As Venice on the waters, the sea-swan.

What bosky gardens, dropped in close-walled courts
As plums in ladies' laps who start and laugh:
What miles of streets that run on after trees,
Still carrying all the necessary shops,
Those open caskets with the jewels seen!
And trade is art, and art's philosophy,
In Paris. There's a silk for instance, there,

As worth an artist's study for the folds

As that bronze opposite! nay, the bronze has faults,
Art's here too artful,-conscious as a maid

Who leans to mark her shadow on the wall
Until she lose a 'vantage in her step.

Yet Art walks forward, and knows where to walk;
The artists also are idealists,

Too absolute for nature, logical

To austerity in the application of

The special theory-not a soul content

To paint a crooked pollard and an ass,

As the English will because they find it so

And like it somehow.-There the old Tuileries
Is pulling its high cap down on its eyes,
Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazed
By the apparition of a new fair face

In those devouring mirrors. Through the grate
Within the gardens, what a heap of babes,
Swept up like leaves beneath the chestnut-trees
From every street and alley of the town,

By the ghosts perhaps that blow too bleak this way
A-looking for their heads! dear pretty babes,
I wish them luck to have their ball-play out
Before the next change. Here the air is thronged
With statues, poised upon their columns fine

As if to stand a moment were a feat,

Against that blue! What squares, what breathing-room
For a nation that runs fast,-ay, runs against
The dentist's teeth at the corner in pale rows,
Which grin at progress in an epigram.

We add one passage more, wonderful for the imaginative subtlety with which it is conceived and worked out,-Aurora's account of her mother's picture, which hung upon the wall of the silent house, among the mountains above Pelago," to which her father had retired after losing her, with his child and their faithful old Assunta :

The painter drew it after she was dead,

And when the face was finished, throat and hands,

Her cameriera carried him, in hate

Of the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocade
She dressed in at the Pitti; "he should paint
No sadder thing than that," she swore, "to wrong
Her poor signora." Therefore very strange
The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch
For hours upon the floor with knees drawn up,
And gaze across them, half in terror, half
In adoration, at the picture there,-

That swan-like supernatural white life
Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk
Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power
To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds.
For hours I sat and stared. Assunta's awe
And my poor father's melancholy eyes

Still pointed that way. That way went my thoughts
When wandering beyond sight. And as I grew

In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,

Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,

Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,

Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,

With still that face. . . which did not therefore change,

But kept the mystic level of all forms,

Hates, fears, and admirations was by turns

Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,
A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,
A still Medusa with mild milky brows
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes
Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or anon
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords
Where the Babe sucked; or Lamia in her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked
And shuddering wriggled down to the unclean;
Or my own mother, leaving her last smile
In her last kiss upon the baby-mouth

My father pushed down on the bed for that,-
Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,
Buried at Florence.

There are only two other names in the poetical literature of the present age that can be held to stand incontestably in the first rank;-Tennyson and Robert Browning. Diverse in much, they have nevertheless also much in common. They are both of them profound and subtle thinkers as well as richly endowed with the divine faculty of poetry in special; thinkers, and also workers; and so each has made himself a consummate artist in addition to whatever he might otherwise have been of a great poet. Tennyson, our present English King of Song, crowned as

such not more by official nomination than by the general voice, has won to himself the personal attachment of his countrymen in a degree that has been rarely equalled in the history of literature. Among ourselves, Scott is the only other great writer who ever was held during his lifetime in anything like the same universal love and honour. The poetry of Tennyson has charmed all hearts by something more than its artistic qualities. It is as full of nobleness as of beauty. The laurel when he resigns it to another will again be acknowledged by all to be "greener from the brows of him that uttered nothing base." Everywhere his verse, whether tender or lofty, whether light-hearted or sad, breathes the kindest and manliest nature. Not only the chief of his shorter poems, but his In Memoriam and his Idylls of the King, are familiar to all readers. simplest and quietest manner, but it is very perfect :The following is in his

In her ear he whispers gaily,

"If my heart by signs can tell,
Maiden, I have watched thee daily,
And I think thou lov'st me well."
She replies, in accents fainter,
"There is none I love like thee."
He is but a landscape-painter,
And a village maiden she.
He to lips that fondly falter
Presses his without reproof;
Leads her to the village altar,
And they leave her father's roof.
"I can make no marriage present:
Little can I give my wife.

Love will make our cottage pleasant,
And I love thee more than life."

They by parks and lodges going,
See the lordly castles stand:
Summer woods, about them blowing,
Made a murmur in the land.
From deep thought himself he rouses,
Says to her that loves him well,
"Let us see these handsome houses
Where the wealthy nobles dwell."
So she goes by him attended,
Hears him lovingly converse,
Sees whatever fair and splendid
Lay betwixt his home and hers;
Parks with oak and chestnut shady,
Parks and ordered gardens great,
Ancient homes of lord and lady,

Built for pleasure and for state.