are lovingly dwelt upon in Tennyson's descriptive poetry. He was a patriot who loved his native country best-her citizens, her government, her traditions, and not less the flowers in her fields, the skies above them, and the sea that keeps her inviolate. It is instructive, however disillusionising, to note the extraordinary "interval" in the fine judgment of such an artist, which permitted these lines (afterwards suppressed), entitled The Skipping-Rope, a place beside the truly great poems of 1842:

'Sure never yet was antelope

Could skip so lightly by.

Stand off, or else my skipping-rope
Will hit you in the eye.

How lightly whirls the skipping-rope !

How fairy-like you fly!

Go, get you gone, you muse and mope—

I hate that silly sigh.

Nay, dearest, teach me how to hope,

Or tell me how to die.

There, take it, take my skipping-rope,

And hang yourself thereby."

The future may discover in this some oracular meaning, but surely. Fitzgerald was justified when he said: Alfred, whatever he may think, cannot trifle. His smile is rather a grim one."*

66

* Fitzgerald's Letters, p. 95.

CHAPTER III.

SINCE Shakespeare's day woman had not occupied in English poetry so large and gracious a space as in the character-studies of Tennyson's early volumes. The ideals of chivalry were come again, but enriched and refined.

The

1847.

In The Princess, published in 1847, the now widelyknown poet became the poetic interpreter and critic of that movement of thought and feeling which concerned itself with the position of woman in the social organisation. In a fantastic and half serious, half sportive allegory, "moving Princess. as in a strange diagonal," he outlined and reduced to form the many elements in the problem, and by his statement, no less than by his solution of the questions involved, gave definite and concrete shape to the vague aspirations and somewhat nebulous ideas present in the intellectual atmosphere.

Criticise it as you will, and the early reviewers were not tardy in expressing disapproval, The Princess is a poem full of Tennyson's own peculiar charm. "A medley," as it was called, incongruous and unreal, if it betrays the poet's faults and weaknesses, it cannot be denied to possess many of his most winning and most characteristic excellences. Like most of his longer poems, it was built up to its present shape through successive editions. ond edition, published after a year's interval, contained

The sec

few changes, and was dedicated to Henry Lushington,* an ardent admirer, with whom the author was on a visit in September, 1847, and whose friendship was one of the most prized in his life. With the third edition (1850) began the series of extensive emendations, omissions, and additions, which were continued. in the fourth and fifth editions of 1851 and 1853. The hint for the story is by some believed to have been given in Johnson's Rasselas. "The princess thought, that of all sublunary things, knowledge was the best; she desired, first, to learn all sciences, and then proposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside, that, by conversing with the old and educating the young, she might divide her time between the acquisition and communication of wisdom, and raise up for the next age models of prudence and patterns of piety." It has been suggested by others that the inspiration came from Defoe or Margaret Cavendish's Female Academy. By others, again, the clue to the genesis of The Princess is found in the lines:

"This were a medley! we should have him back
Who told the 'Winter's Tale' to do it for us,"

and the central idea in the plot of Love's Labour's Lost, which turns upon a three years' enforced seclusion in study and apart from women:

"Our court shall be a little Academe,

Still and contemplative in living art."

The question is not a grave one and need not be

* 'If all Mr. Tennyson's writings had by some strange accident been destroyed, Henry Lushington's wonderful memory could, I believe, have reproduced the whole."-Memoir of Henry Lushington, by G. S. Venables.

definitely answered. The scene of the Prologue is laid in the south of England, and the surroundings are those of Sir John Simeon's garden at Swainston. The host, in whose grounds the opening festival is held, is probably the poet's friend under the disguise of Sir Walter Vivian. Some lines (afterwards omitted) in the Epilogue, which was almost entirely rewritten for the third edition, give an account of the original design, and its subsequent development:

"Here closed our compound story, which at first

Had only meant to banter little maids

With mock heroics and with parody;

But slipt in some strange way, crost with burlesque,
From mock to earnest, even into tones

Of tragic, and with less and less of jest
To such a serious end."

Besides remodelling the Prologue and Epilogue, and in many respects shaping the poem to a later design, Tennyson added to the third edition the exquisite songs, which alone secure for the work in which they are set an immortality of remembrance. It already contained that wonderful isometric lyric, Tears, Idle Tears, which I am inclined to regard as the most characteristic of his genius of any poem ever written by the author, and that for two reasons. It is his most successful expression of the emotion of vague regret, of dumb inarticulate pain of heart, a province of universal human feeling, which Tennyson alone among poets* has found a voice to render, and thus made peculiarly his own.

Here, as in the lines :

* If he have a rival in this province it is Goethe.

Break, break, break

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea !''*

he has sounded the hidden and mysterious places of the soul, whence at times wells up a nameless and a causeless sorrow, and to its incommunicable speech the chords of his music vibrate. And of the music the form, too, is all his own. That the measure is the measure of Hamlet and the Paradise Lost is difficult to realise. The subtle sweetness of the modulation is typical of Tennyson's handling of our great national metre, and is displayed here in its fullest perfection. He discovered in it a lyric quality hitherto unsuspected, and if it be objected that the division into stanzas and the recurrence of the phrase "days that are no more" serves to compensate for the absence of rhyme, it is only necessary to turn to the "small sweet idyll," "Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height," where without stanza or definite rhyme the effect of lyric movement is perfectly attained. In the concluding lines of the last-named poem there is much onomatopoeic beauty :†

* 66

"Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

And murmuring of innumerable bees."

Written," said Tennyson, "in a Lincolnshire lane at five o'clock in the morning."

+ Onomatopoeic effects are common in Tennyson, as in such a passage as this:

Plunged: and the flood drew; yet I caught her; then

Oaring one arm, and bearing in my left

The weight of all the hopes of half the world,
Strove to buffet to land in vain."

-The Princess.