are subject to disturbance, all must be purchased with labour, and preserved with care. The liability of the human frame to countless diseases, and the virulence of a fever, is the same thing with relation to health, that our proneness to error, and the deadliness of a particular heresy, is to truth. And if we are yet more puzzled to reconcile the more concentrated virulence of error at a particular time, with the fall of thousands upon thousands, this is but a moral pestilence, and is analogous with the plagues that have desolated nations, and perhaps the whole world, at the same time. The one we know to be consistent with the goodness and power of an all-wise Disposer of events; the other too we know cannot but be right, and reconcileable with his love, and justice, and power, even though we may not see exactly in what way. And yet one thing we can see, that thus faith is made victorious in conflict, so as to gain a crown; for "whosoever overcometh," saith the Son of Man, "I will grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in His throne."* Poems, chiefly of Early and Late Years. By W. WORDSWORTH. Moxon. 1842. The Pilgrim of Glencoe, and other Poems. By THOMAS CAMPBELL. Moxon. 1842. Poems. By ALFRED TENNYSON. Moxon. 1842. Poems from Eastern Sources: the Stedfast Prince, &c. By R. C. 1842. The Baptistery. By the Rev. T. WILLIAMS, Author of "The Cathedral." Rivingtons. 1841. Poems. By the Rev. T. WHYTEHEAD, M.A. Rivingtons. 1842. The Progress of Religion: a Poem. By Sir A. EDMONSTONE. Burns. 1842. Luther: a Poem. By the Rev. R. MONTGOMERY, M.A. Baisler. 1842. Luther, or, Rome and the Reformation. Seeley & Burnside. 1841. HAVING now parted company with Wordsworth and Campbell, we must betake ourselves to the rising generation of poets. Among them, Mr. Tennyson is pretty generally acknowledged to hold the foremost place. He has already been the subject of more criticism, favourable and unfavourable, than all the others put together; and if his poetry has its bitter decriers, it cannot be denied that he stands alone among his contemporaries in respect of the fervent admirers he has raised up. This circumstance alone sufficiently exposes the tone * Rev. iii. 21. of unmixed contempt which some have thought proper to adopt concerning him. Those who have even worshipped his genius, however excessive we may deem the homage which they render, are surely neither the least intelligent nor the worst educated of their time. It is not very likely, therefore, that they should be found. perseveringly, and for years, delighted with absolute trash. And surely when Mr. Tennyson's verses are read with a mind free from any undue prepossession against them, however faulty in some respects they may appear to us, we cannot but feel that we are in contact with a true and original poet. None other could have sounded those rich and strange melodies or combined those wondrous oriental splendours of "the golden time of good Haroun Al Raschid "or uttered that passionate and frantic cry over Oriana, pierced by the false, false arrow,-or brought before us the dreary desolation of " Mariana in the moated grange." On the earlier productions of Mr. Tennyson we need not dwell long at present. The reader will find the flower of them in the two volumes now before us, to which, as regards them, we have little to object beyond the one or two alterations he has made in them. On this subject we expressed our sentiments in our last. Mr. Tennyson's alterations of his former poems are fewer in number than Mr. Wordsworth's, and having been made after a much shorter interval of time from their composition, are, in so far, less prejudicial. Still it has been long enough, as we think, to make our argument in the case of the former apply to this also-that after a while the original impulse cannot be reproduced-that the work has become nearly as objective to its author as to any one else, and that its parts have got to cohere too closely to be safely tampered with. Therefore, while we strongly deprecate anything like carelessness,-while we would preach even to the richest and highest genius the necessity of labouring after perfection in art,-we think the task of correcting and polishing ought to accompany the work in its progress, instead of being undertaken long after. These remarks, of course, will not apply to the simple removal of a fantastic disfigurement, like the "more lovelier" with which Mr. Tennyson thought proper at first to adorn his Enone, from which we are glad now to see that beautiful poem purified. Neither would they have condemned some modification instead of the almost entire omission of the following passage in the Palace of Art, which, on its first appearance, was rather roughly handled, and which was certainly too startling an assemblage of names for the public gravity. "There deephair'd Milton, like an angel tall, "And in the sunpierced Oriel's colour'd flame Look'd down, bold Luther, largebrow'd Verulam, "Cervantes, the bright face of Calderon, "Isaiah with fierce Ezekiel, Swarth Moses by the Coptic sea, This, we have said, was rather too much, and was not inaptly compared to a well-known stanza in the Groves of Blarney. At the same time it was forgotten that a grouping of names, great in world history, as Mr. Carlyle would call them, suited the drift of the poem in the place where it occurred; and that Mr. Tennyson's, in spite of its absurdity here and there, was an imitation in parts by no means unhappy of a well-known passage in the end of the fourth book of the Inferno. But they do condemn such a change as the following, in virtue of which in the fine termination of one of the Spenserian stanzas in 'the Lotos-eaters;" the words, have become, "far off, three mountaintops Three thundercloven thrones of oldest snow, "far off, three mountaintops, Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, Stood sunsetflushed." And in the same poem we cannot but regret the loss of these magnificent lines: "We have had enough of motion, Weariness and wild alarm, Tossing on the tossing ocean, Where the tusked seahorse walloweth In a stripe of grassgreen calm, At noon tide beneath the lee; And the monstrous narwhale swalloweth His foamfountains in the sea. Long enough the winedark wave our weary bark did carry. This is lovelier and sweeter, Men of Ithaca, this is meeter, In the hollow rosy vale to tarry, Like a dreamy Lotos-eater, a delirious Lotos-eater! We will eat the Lotos, sweet As the yellow honeycomb, In the valley some, and some On the ancient heights divine; To the melancholy home At the limit of the brine, The little isle of Ithaca, beneath the day's decline. No more unfurl the straining sail; Hark! how sweet the horned ewes bleat And the merry lizard leaps, And the foamwhite waters pour; And the dark pine weeps, And the lithe vine creeps, On the level of the shore: Oh! islanders of Ithaca, we will not wander more. Surely, surely slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore though we fully appreciate their splendid substitute, which ought to have been combined with, instead of supplanting, them. It runs as follows: "We have had enough of action, and of motion we, Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclin'd, On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world: Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Till they perish and they suffer-some, 'tis whisper'd, down in hell Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore On receiving so many new poems from Mr. Tennyson, we cannot but feel sure of a high gratification. The first question, however, that occurs to us (such gratification being in itself a certainty) is this has the author's mind made progress? Are we yet any considerable way beyond the rich promise of the "Poems, chiefly Lyrical?" We have great pleasure, as far as our judgment goes, in answering this question, in one sense, in the affirmative. There is much positive progress. The poems in the second of the two volumes before us are unquestionably, we think, greater and finer performances than those in the first. Independently of the greater depth and body of thought by which they are marked, we are glad to see the effervescence of Mr. Tennyson's youthful style tamed down, his mannerisms nearly all disappeared, (especially one which we once feared was destined to grow upon him-a passion for compound words,) and to find him writing on the whole such genuine and vigorous English. Still we are unsatisfied. Though there is positive progress, there is not the amount we could have wished or expected. "The Two Voices" may in itself be a finer poem than the "Recollections of the Arabian Nights;" but the latter gave a promise of something better still, a promise which yet remains to be kept by the poet. And Mr. Tennyson has not yet become human enough for our cravings. We desiderate "the common growth of mother earth" in his stanzas. He is still too fantastic,-too removed from "familiar matters of to-day"-from the ordinary fountains of mirth and woe,still too much a dweller in a baseless world of dream, that is not earth nor heaven." There is much, we can assure him, in the alternative presented in our last quotation. The great poet dwells in heaven or earth, but never long out of the one or the other. He is of those, "who soar, but never roam, True to the kindred points of heaven and home." If he quits for a long while our ordinary, our homebred scenes, it is to be sublime, not to be fantastic. We cannot help suspecting that Mr. Tennyson's mind has been led astray on this matter, not only by natural bias, but by a mistaken theory. At least, one that was in our judgment such had some prevalence, if we mistake not, among his fervent admirers, and was ably propounded and advocated by one of them*-the most richly endowed with gifts natural and acquired—the noblest and the loveliest of spirits, but, alas for us! not destined to yield in this world the harvest of which his spring gave so wondrous a promise. : The theory to which we allude is somewhat to this effect that to realize its aim, art should keep quite distinct from all that is not of itself that poetry, therefore, as a branch of art, should admit nothing heterogeneous, such as persuasion to any particular line of belief or conduct, the inculcation of opinion, and so forth. Whether rightly or wrongly, it is but too easy to infer from this, that the poet should be a kind of being altogether distinct from his fellows, that he should neither participate in their duties nor their cares,that the strife of opinion should be to him but as the other sounds of the world around him, the rustling of the leaves, the stir of the wind, or the murmuring of streams, that he should, as a poet, "dwell apart, holding no form of creed, but contemplating all." In a periodical entitled "The Englishman's Magazine," which had a brief existence two years ago. The essay to which we allude was a review of the "Poems chiefly Lyrical," of which it has never been made a secret that the author was Arthur Henry Hallam. |