And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand If Alfred Tennyson became awake to the actual world in his second volume of 1832, his publication in 1843 showed him more completely so; awake after the storm, after the wrecks, the deepest experiences of life. In the ten years' interval he has known and suffered. So far from any of his private personal feelings being paraded before the public, either directly, or by means of characters which everybody shall recognise as identical, after the fashion of Lord Byron, there is a withdrawal from every identification, and generally a veil of ideality cast over the whole. Certainly Tennyson is not at all dramatic. That he can be intensely tragic, in pure emotion and deep passion of expression, we shall presently show; that he has great power of concentration, will be equally apparent; and that in his powerful monodrama of "St. Simeon Stylites," and in the various imaginative or fanciful personages he introduces, he presents full evidence of the faculty of self-absorption in the identity of other idiosyncrasies, we think also to be incontestible. Still, he only selects a peculiar class of charactersthose in whom it shall not be requisite to dispossess himself of beauty (Stylites being the only exception); nor can he speak without singing. His style of blank verse is elegiac, epic, heroic, or suited to the idyl; and not at all dramatic. His characters, as we have said before, are generalizations or abstractions; they pass before the imagination, and often into the very centre of the heart and all its emotions; they do not stand forth conspicuous in bone or muscle, nor in solidity, nor roundness, nor substantial identity. They have no little incidental touches of character, and we should not know them if we met them out of his poetry. They do not eat and drink, and sneeze. One never thought of that before; and it seems an offence to hint at such a thing concerning them. But besides all this, our poet cannot laugh outright in his verses; not joyously, and with self-abandonment. His comic, grotesque, or burlesque pieces, are neither natural nor wild. They are absolute failures by dint of ingenuity. His "Amphion" and "the Goose" have everything but that which such attempts most need-animal spirits. There is something intermediate, however, which he can do, and which is ten thousand times more uncommon, that of an harmonious blending of the poetical and familiar, so that the latter shall neither destroy the former, nor vex the taste of the reader. As an instance of this, we would quote " Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," which is perfection; as also were Shelley's poetical "Letter to," and his "Julian and Maddalo." Of the constructive power, and the distribution of action required in a dramatic composition, there is no need to speak; but it is time to consider the tragic faculties of our author, and his power over the passions by description. The frequent tendency to the development or illustration of tragic emotion has been less noticed than any other important feature of Tennyson's poetry. In his first volume (1830) we find a "Dirge;" the "Death of Love;" the "Ballad of Oriana;" the Supposed Confession ;" and "Mariana;" all of which are full of the emotions and thoughts which lead directly, if they do not involve, tragic results. The same may be said of the following poems in the second volume (1832):-the "Lady of Shalott;" "Eleanore ;" "Sappho" (called "Fatima" in the new edition!); "Enone;" the "New Year's Eve;" and the "Sisters." Upon this last-named poem we will venture a few remarks and suggestions. "The Sisters" is a ballad poem of six stanzas, each of only four lines, with two lines of a chorus sung by the changeful roaring of the wind "in turret and tree"-which is made to appear conscious of the passions that are at work. In this brief space is comprised, fully told, and with many suggestions beyond, a deep tragedy. The story is briefly this. A youthful earl of great personal attractions, seduces a young lady of family, deserts her, and she dies. Her sister, probably an elder sister, and not of equal beauty, had, apparently, also loved the earl. When, therefore, she found that not only had her love been in vain, but her selfsacrifice in favour of her sister had only led to the misery and degradation of the latter, she resolved on the earl's destruction. She exerted herself to the utmost to attract his regard; she "hated him with the hate of hell," but, it is added, that she "loved his beauty passing well," for the earl" was fair to see." Abandoning herself in every way to the accomplishment of her purpose, she finally lulled him to sleep, with his head in her lap, and then stabbed him "through and through." She composed and smoothed the curls upon "his comely head," admiring to see that "he looked so grand when he was dead;" and wrapping him in a winding sheet, she carried him to his proud ancestral hall, and "laid him at his mother's feet." We have no space to enter into any psychological examination of the peculiar character of this sister; with regard, however, to her actions, the view that seems most feasible, and the most poetical, if not equally tragic, is that she did not actually commit the self-abandonment and murder; but went mad on the death of her sister, and imagined in her delirium all that has been related. But "read the part" how we may, there never was a deeper thing told in briefer words. The third volume of "Tennyson's Poems," (that is, the Vol. II. of the new edition last issued), contains several tragic subjects. The one most penetrating to the heart, the most continuous, and most persevered in with passionate intensity, so that it becomes ineradicable from the sensibility and the memory, is "Locksley Hall.” The story is very simple; not narrative, but told by the soliloquy of anguish poured out by a young man amid the hollow weed-grown courts of a ruined mansion. He loved passionately; his love was returned; and the girl married another, - a dull, every-day sort of husband. The story is a familiar one in the world-too familiar; but in Tennyson's hands it becomes invested with yet deeper life, a vitality of hopeless desolation. The sufferer invoking his betrayer, her beauty and her falsehood, by the memory of their former happiness, says that such a memory is the very crown of sorrow : "Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof, In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof. Like a dog he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall, Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall. Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep, |