after she knew the truth, she would often dwell on their mysterious meaning, and on how she had failed to apprehend it till too late. And thus these judicious touches of the supernatural make the tale in which they occur seem additionally natural and lifelike. But if the Laureate thus knows how to deal with the unwarranted beliefs of the simple, and how to extract from them poetic embellishment, he also knows how to make a noble use of their religious faith. The grandest and most poetical book in the English language lies as open to the poor as to the rich; and is often more deeply pondered by the former than by the latter. And it is not too much to say that some of the most beautiful passages in Enoch Arden' are those in which Holy Scripture is reverently quoted. Not to refer again to Annie's dream; how fine, for instance, are the quotations from the Bible in Enoch's homely farewell to her!— "Annie, my girl, cheer up, be comforted; Look to the babes, and till I come again Keep everything ship-shape, for I must go. And fear no more for me; or, if you fear, holds. Is He not yonder in those uttermost To the first nautical phrase we in- how the way in which the sailor's voice, resting on the pause in the psalm he had weekly chanted, symbolises, as nothing else could do, his soul's repose on the, to him, all-consoling truth which it contains? Curious felicities of expression of this sort occur often in the poem. We mean words which exactly render the thought, so arranged that their sound echoes, or forms a musical accompaniment to it. Of this the lines describing Annie's secord marriage (quoted some way back) are an instance. The wedding-bells ring in the first two lines. Those which succeed run heavily with the weight of foreboding which they carry. Of the same sort is the description (earlier still in the poem) of the death of Annie's little one: "Howsoe'er it was, After a lingering-ere she was awareLike the caged bird escaping suddenly, The little innocent soul flitted away." The idea of life escaping like a bird is indeed old, as most beautiful ideas are;* but the music of the lines (the hurried rhythm of the last one denoting the mother's anxiety, its abrupt conclusion how the little heart suddenly ceases to beat, and then the pause after it betokening the mother's sorrow) is Mr. Tennyson's own.t There is another secret of the Laureate's strength-one which has been often pointed out before-observable in the poem we are considering. The way in which he suits his background of landscape to the figures in his foreground, and so pictures the aspects of nature as seen by a human eye and felt by a human "Thou, as a bird escapes, art vanished from me; Όρνις γὰρ ὡς τις ἐκ χερῶν ἄφαντος εἴ, -Eur. Hip. 829. The "flitting" soul recalls to our mind Mr. Merivale's admirable translation of the dying emperor's address to his own. quoting it here: "Animula, vagula, blandula, We may earn some reader's thanks by "Soul of mine, pretty one, flitting one, Guest and partner of my clay, heart; whose joys they reflect by their brightness, or trouble with apprehension by their gloom; whose sorrows they soften by their mute sympathy, or increase by the seeming mockery of sharp and violent contrast. Such is the effect of this description of "the beauteous hateful isle," which holds the humble Ulysses of the tale so long a pri soner: "The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to The lightning-flash of insect and of bird, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The moving whisper of huge trees, No sail from day to day, but every day Among the palms and ferns and preci The blaze upon the waters to the east; . The former picture derives its significance from contrast, this latter one from resemblance; for the seafog which swallows up the sunshine is emblematic of the disappointment which awaits the bright hopes of Enoch's return. · Were we writing of an author not yet known to fame, it would be as right as it would be pleasant to make long extracts from the concluding portion of the poem. But when reviewing a work which every one praises, which everybody has bought, and which it is therefore fair to suppose that every one (bat those whose aversion to poetry is invincible) has read, it is needless to extract any passages which are not required to make the critic's remarks intelligible. We may therefore briefly record our admiration for the sustained power and absence of maudlin sensibility with which the last scenes of Enoch Arden' are put before us. They are very pathetic; and they are never foolishly sentimental. The way in which Enoch is stunned by the news of his wife's second marriage; his longing to see her, and assure himself that she is happy; the picture of peace and comfort within Philip's house, which throws into stronger relief the anguish of the wretched husband and father as he stands without; Enoch's grand (if not strictly just) self-sacrifice, as, what only to hear of had been woe recovering from the shock of seeing sufficient, he repeats his resolution to himself, Not to tell her, never to let her know:" all these Very good also are the aspects of things in the hands of a French nature which greet his return home: The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again How pitilessly must these glories have seemed to mock the solitary captive's anguish ! How natural it is that visions of home should haunt his loneliness, presenting to him things most unlike his present abode: "The chill November dawns, and dewy-glooming downs, leaves, The gentle shower, the smell of dying of leaden-coloured And the low moan seas!" merely often, and occasionally still, the Laureate has been known to indulge himself in a clever simile which, by its far-fetched air, suggests that the subject was made for it, and not it for the subject. But it is not so here. How finely appropriate it is to liken the attraction which his "lost wife's fireside" exercises on the returned sailor, to "the beacon blaze," which "allures "The bird of passage, till he madly strikes Against it, and beats out his weary life!"* Again, after Enoch's heroic determination, we are told that "Prayer from a living source within the will, And beating up through all the bitter world, Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, And when his year of hopeless toil and living death has done its work, we read of him that "No gladlier does the stranded wreck See thro' the gray skirts of a lifting squall The boat that bears the hope of life approach, To save the life despair'd of, than he saw Death dawning on him, and the close of all." These three images are all good in themselves; but they derive an especial excellence from the fact, that they occur in a tale of seaadventure, narrated on a sea-beach. And when Enoch's lips, unsealed by approaching death, reveal his secret to his humble attendant, how few are the lines which set before us that contrast which sounds with such thrilling power in Job's long lamentation! the man as he once was, and the man such as calamity has made him "Did you know Enoch Arden of this town?" "Know him?' she said; 'I knew him far away. For they tell us that what he prayed for in those long years of banishment, to which his mind has wandered back, has come at last: the ship to take him to the true Haven: and that the exile has at length been fetched home. There, in our judgment, the poem Its author, should have ended.. thinking differently, adds: "So past the strong heroic soul away. What need of the first of these lines? What need to tell us that the noble fisherman was strong and *Contrast the same simile in 'The Princess,' where Ida is said to stand "Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves Not to speak of the disproportion between the terror raised by these words and the small amount of "ruin" which ensues, the image seems a violent one to apply to a beautiful girl, however steadfast in her anger! heroic, when the poet has just completed his fine delineation of his strength and heroism? And what need of the two last? The costly funeral sounds an impertinent intrusion. We cannot doubt for a moment that Philip gave honourable burial to the man whom he had so deeply, though so unwitting ly, wronged. But the atonement is such a poor one, that it looks like a mockery; and we would rather hear nothing of it. Why disturb in our minds the image which what went before had left there?-the humble bed on which the form, so often tempest-tossed, reposes in its last sleep; the white face, serene in death, waiting for the kisses which it might not receive in life. "Ciò che'l viver non ebbe, abbia la morte." Obeying that attraction to the sea which 'Enoch Arden' leaves behind it, we feel inclined next to cast a passing glance at the 'Sea Dreams.' As Theocritus, in one of bis idyls, gives us the talk of two townswomen of his own day, hastening to a festival, so here the Laureate records for our edification the far weightier sayings of two townspeople of our time, during the festive rest from toil which a visit to the sea-side affords them. A stern critic might, indeed, find fault with them as somewhat too magniloquent. He might ask whether it is not incongruous for a city clerk (however superior to city clerks in general) to complain of his treacherous friend in such Shakspearean terms as the following: "I found a hard friend in his loose ac as the clerk's worthy wife proves herself by her rejoinder : "He that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd." While praising the clever imitation of the satire of the eighteenth century, with which the clerk brands the hypocrite who has wronged him (the two first lines of which might be sworn to as Pope's any day), he might yet pertinaciously beg to be informed how a satire of the presumed date could contain a reference to Bible-meetings: "With all his conscience and one eye askew, So false, he partly took himself for true. Nor deeds of gift, but gifts of grace he forged, And, snake-like, slimed his victim ere he gorged; And oft at Bible-meetings, o'er the rest Dropping the too rough H in Hell and To spread the word by which himself had thriven." And, lastly, he might point at the pomp of gorgeous language in which the two dreams are told, as a reckless expenditure of poetic wealth, alike unsuited to the occasion and to the persons who employ it. Nor can we deny that there would be some truth in these observations. But we might reply, and we do, that in like manner our old friends Tityrus and Menalcas are more polite and more poetical than the shepherds of actual life; and that if the clerk chose to pass off his own composition as an "old satire," he had a right (poetically speaking) to do so. Indeed, what reasonable liberties can we forbid a man to take, who has enriched our stock of quotations with such a saying as this: "How many will say, 'Forgive,' and find A sort of absolution in the sound To hate a little longer?" Or this, which we like still better: "Is it so true that second thoughts are best? Not First, and third, which are a riper first!" We can find no fault, and only wish for ourselves visions as fair when next we sleep beside the sea as those two dreams; in the last of which we seem to hear the musical roar of the swelling tide so plainly :— "But round the North, a light, A belt, it seem'd of luminous vapour, lay, And over in it a low musical note Swell'd up and died; and as it swell'd, a ridge Of breaker issued from the belt, and still note Had reached a thunderous fullness, on those cliffs Broke, mixt with awful light. And then the great ridge drew, Lessening to the lessening music, back, And pass'd into the belt and swell'd again Slowly to music." audience. Mr. Tennyson has avoided this first peril with his usual success. His farmer has no long history to relate. That of Tithonus may be safely supposed already known. And the Grandmother has a right to tell as much as she pleases of her own story; both because her young auditor cannot know much of it, and because it is the privilege of old age to be garrulous. The second and greater difficulty, is one which the writer of the monologue has to overcome in common with the dramatist. He must preserve the propriety of its speaker's character throughout. He must not suffer him to reflect on his own case with the sharp-sightedness of a bystander. Nor must he make him think aloud (unless in some exceptional cases of overmastering feeling); for that would be to confound the monologue with the soliloquy. Now we think that Tithonus' will be found (the exception stated being allowed) to satisfy these conditions. In 'The Northern Farmer' we seem to discover one or two slight inconsistencies. At least he quotes the Psalms very correctly for a man who by his own account had such faint perceptions of what went on in church during his attendance there. And though the boldness with which he questions the dealings of Providence towards himself is conceivable as the thought of the mind, it seems hardly so when it finds expression in words. A greater authority than Mr. Tennyson tells us that when the fool said, "There is no God," he said it in his heart. Surely when a yet greater fool owns God, and nevertheless presumes to blame the wisdom of His appointments, it will be done in his heart too! There is, however, someThere are two principal dangers thing very masterly in the life-like incurred in composing a mono- sketch of the man, with which his logue. The one that of rendering discourse furnishes us. The subit, like an Euripidean prologue, ject is painful, but it is very a conventional narration of facts cleverly treated. How fine are by a person who has no suffici- the touches which set him beent reason for rehearsing them, fore us in his imperturbable selfapart from the dramatic neces- satisfaction, as he reflects on his sity of making them known to the landlord's confidence, the "qua The Laureate's reputation rests on few firmer pillars than are afforded it by some of the monologues among his earlier poems. It is natural, therefore, to turn with eager expectation to the three in his new volume. The third most amply satisfies; the two first do not altogether disappoint it. No one of the three is (like Locks ley Hall' and the greater part of 'St. Simeon Stylites') a soliloquy. Nor is any one of them like the conclusion of their author's 'Ulysses,' an address to an audience, numerous though mute. They are each, as are several of his other monologues, spoken to a single hearer. As the mother in the Queen of May,' so in the 'Grandmother,' the little girl is the only listener. Eos alone hearkens to the lamentations of 'Tithonus,' as mother Ida to those of Enone;' and the 'Northern Farmer' gives the whole benefit of his strange experience to the person who fills the unenviable place of his sick-nurse. |