measures, Tennyson might have been trusted to write upon any subject at any length without fear of descent into the slipshod or turgid movement of Wordsworth's lengthy disquisitions.

The word-painting of The Princess, no less than its versification, will reward a careful study. It seems that the author was in the habit of noting a scene or aspect of nature in a few brief phrases, as a painter might with a dash or two of colour suggest a scheme for future elaboration. Here is the result where the memory of an approaching storm, seen from the brow of Snowdon, supplied the original suggestion :

"As one that climbs a peak to gaze

O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night,
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore,
And suck the blinding splendour from the sand,
And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn
Expunge the world."

I am unacquainted with any poem exhibiting a more luxuriant richness of colour or more vivid and delicate picturesqueness of imagery. Illustration is needless, but take this :

Glanced like a touch of sunshine on the rocks,

Many a light foot shone like a jewel set

In the dark crag."

In its entirety, The Princess, though not his most ambitious work, displays, as I have already indicated, the qualities of Tennyson's genius which the future will speak of as "Tennysonian," as exclusively his own, the qualities which of all English poets he possessed and cultivated in the fullest measure. It is the highest conceivable reach in decorative art, nor can

lyrical sweetness be further sweetened.

Half classic,

half mediæval in feeling, wholly modern in subject and treatment, it represents the character of the author's mind. His culture enabled him to embellish and enrich with a wealth of suggestion and illustration so fresh a theme as the emancipation of woman, in a style of captivating, dream-like phantasy, and, as in The Idylls of the King, the strongest elements in his nature, mysticism and romance, are subtly woven through the whole.

The following letter, the most important and interesting ever written by Tennyson in connexion with his poetry, was addressed to Mr. S. E. Dawson, author of A Study of "The Princess." It naturally claims a place here:

"ALDWORTH, HASLEMERE, SURREY, November 21, 1882.

"DEAR SIR: I thank you for your able and thoughtful essay on The Princess. You have seen, among other things, that if women ever were to play such freaks, the tragic and the burlesque might go hand in hand. I tell you may that the songs were not an afterthought. Before the first edition came out I deliberated with myself whether I should put songs in between the separate divisions of the poem; again, I thought, the poem will explain itself; but the public did not see that the child, as you say, was the heroine of the piece, and at last I conquered my laziness and inserted them. You would be still more certain that the child was the true heroine, if instead of the first song as it now stands,

"As thro' the land at eve we went,'

I had printed the first song which I wrote, The Losing

of the Child. The child is sitting on the bank of the river, and playing with flowers; a flood comes down; a dam has been broken through; the child is borne down by the flood; the whole village distracted; after a time the flood has subsided; the child is thrown safe and sound again upon the bank, and all the women are in raptures. I quite forget the words of the ballad, but I think I may have it somewhere.

"Your explanatory notes are very much to the purpose, and I do not object to your finding parallelisms. They must always recur. A man (a Chinese scholar) some time ago wrote to me, saying that in an unknown, untranslated Chinese poem there were two whole lines of mine almost word for word. Why not? Are not human eyes all over the world looking at the same objects, and must there not consequently be coincidences of thought and impressions and expressions? It is scarcely possible for any one to say or write anything in this late time of the world to which in the rest of the literature of the world a parallel could not somewhere be found. But when you say that this passage or that was suggested by Wordsworth or Shelley or another, I demur, and, more, I wholly disagree. There was a period in my life when, as an artist-Turner, for instance takes rough sketches of language, etc., in order to work them eventually into some great picture; so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike me as picturesque in nature. I never put these down, and many and many a line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain—e.g. :

66 6

A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight.'

Suggestion: The sea one night at Torquay, when

Torquay was the most lovely sea village in England, though now a smoky town; the sky was covered with thin vapour, and the moon was behind it.

66

"A great black cloud

Drags inward from the deep.'

Suggestion: A coming storm seen from the top of Snowdon. In the Idylls of the King:

66 6 'With all

Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies.'

Suggestion: A storm that came upon us in the mid、 Idle of the North Sea.

"As the water-lily starts and slides.'

Suggestion: Water-lilies in my own pond, seen in a gusty day with my own eyes. They did start and slide in the sudden puffs of wind till caught and stayed by the tether of their own stalks-quite as true as Wordsworth's simile, and more in detail.

"A wild wind shook

Follow, follow, thou shalt win.'

"Suggestion: I was walking in the New Forest. A wind did arise, and :

"Shake the songs, the whispers and the shrieks

Of the wild wood together.'

“The wind, I believe, was a west wind, but because I wished the Prince to go south, I turned the wind to the south, and naturally the wind said, 'Follow.'

"I believe the resemblance which you note is just a chance one. Shelley's lines are not familiar to me, though, of course, if they occur in The Prometheus I must have read them.

"I could multiply instances, but I will not bore you; and far indeed am I from asserting that books,

as well as nature, are not and ought not to be suggestive to the poet. I am sure that I myself and many others find a peculiar charm in those passages of such great masters as Virgil or Milton where they adopt the creation of a bygone poet, and reclothe it, more or less, according to their own fancy.

"But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing up among us, editors of booklets, bookworms, indexhunters, or men of great memories and no imagination, who impute themselves to the poet, and so believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is forever poking his nose between the pages of some old volume in order to see what he can appropriate. They will not allow one to say, 'Ring the bells' without finding that we have taken it from Sir P. Sydney, or even to use such a simple expression as the ocean 'roars' without finding out the precise verse in Homer or Horace from which we have plagiarised it. (Fact!)

"I have known an old fishwife who had lost two sons at sea clench her fist at the advancing tide on a stormy day and cry out: 'Ay, roar; do! How I hates to see thee show thy white teeth!' Now, if I had adopted her exclamation, and put it into the mouth of some old woman in one of my poems, I dare say the critic would have thought it original enough, but would most likely have advised me to go to nature for my old woman, and not to my imagination; and, indeed, it is a strong figure. Here is another little anecdote about suggestion. When I was about twenty or twenty-one I went on a tour to the Pyrenees. Lying among these mountains before a waterfall that comes down one thousand or twelve hundred feet, I sketched it (according to my custom then) in these words: