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lity's admiration, and his own extreme usefulness! His dislike to modern improvements; his insensibility to the rebuke of a man whom he thinks less valuable to the world than himself; above all, his inability to conceive how matters can go on at all after his own death (which yet he would rather hasten than demean himself by taking the unpalatable advice of a "tottler"), are put before us inimitably well. There is something in the state of mind here described which we may all be the wiser for considering; and which we especially hope country rectors will see to be written off for their instruction. That respectable farmer who seems to listen with such rapt attention to his Reverence's serinon every Sunday, perhaps, like his northern brother, never knows what he means, only thinks he has "summat to say." And how many of us all are satisfied that we come up fairly to our own standard of duty, without considering that, if not so eccentric as our poor friend's here, it may yet be a long way from correct! Much would we like to think that he recovered and lived to understand the "Parson" better.

The representation of extreme old age in the "Grandmother" is very accurate. The freshness with which long-past events live in aged minds, as well as their loss of memory for, and interest in, recent occurrences, are described with great truth, The beginning of the poem is confused; and in its progress it runs clearer, exactly like the talk of the very old. The only fault we have to find is, that the old woman appears too much alive to her own state. She explains why she cannot weep at the sad news she has just heard; she makes the sort of reflections on age as a time of peace which we might expect from a stranger looking on. Now a mind so dead to the present as hers is, would hardly be capable of doing this. To our thinking, the prettiest parts of the poem are the aged woman's recollections of her children, and of her

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Altogether the hand which penned The Queen of the May' is not disgraced by 'The Grandmother.' We say both of it and of 'The Northern Farmer' (more than we can say of some of the other minor poems here) that the two pictures were so well worth painting, that to do so was no waste even of Mr. Tennyson's precious time.

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'Aylmer's Field,' the second poem in this volume, differs in subject from the scenes of humble life which we have hitherto examined. Like Maud,' it is a tale of young affection blighted by parental cruelty; but, unlike Maud,' it is cast into a narrative, not a lyrical shape. In that case the pride of wealth, in this the pride of station and of lineage, destroys the happiness of two faithful lovers. The date of the story is in the closing decade of the last century.

It is, we think, indisputable that this poem (though abounding in fine passages) is, as a whole, less satisfactory than 'Enoch Arden.' For this we are disposed to assign two reasons. The first is, that, fully to engage our interest, the subject of a narrative poem should have a certain remoteness from ourselves. If its hero is our contemporary, he should be removed from us, either by place, as in stories of adventure in foreign lands, or by station, as in tales of lowly life. Sir Walter Scott chose no subject for his narrative poems more recent than Charles I.'s reign. And it may be doubted whether

seventy years are distance enough to lend enchantment to our view of Leolin and Edith.

A second and more serious defect (for it is the business of great poets to manufacture exceptions to the rules of treatises on Poetics) is to be found in the construction of the story itself. We are well aware that there are not many tales yet unsung so beautiful as that of the fair maid of Astolat, which the Laureate's kind fate reserved for him to clothe in English verse; and that we have no right to expect him to be always so fortunate in his subjects. But still we cannot help thinking that the incidents in Aylmer's Field' are somewhat trite, and its characters more than somewhat improbable. Its heroine is a model of every Christian virtue; yet she deceives her father, and carries on a clandestine correspondence with her lover. Her pastor is an excellent clergyman; yet when two of his parishioners seek the sanctuary for the first time after their daughter's death, he seizes the opportunity to preach publicly against them. An act surely unbefitting the pulpit of any period or of any country; but simply impossible in that of a decent rector in the decorous Church of England of the eighteenth century. This faulty structure somewhat mars the pleasure we receive from the musical verse and generally vigorous language in which it is clothed. Here and there, too, something overstrained in the expression, seems to sympathise with the exaggerations in the construction, of the poem. There is solemn beauty in its introductory lines:

"Dust are our frames; and, gilded dust,

our pride

Looks only for a moment whole and sound; Like that long-buried body of the king, Found lying with his urns and ornaments, Which at a touch of light, an air of heaven, Slipt into ashes, and was found no more."

Bat in the first line of the story Mr. Tennyson's old infelicity in dealing with the higher orders surely reappears. (That, we mean, which

VOL. XCVI.

20

made his aristocratic Vivians so sadly wanting in repose; and which reached its climax in Maud's brother, the "curl'd Assyrian bull!") He calls his heroine's father The county God." "Sir Aylmer Aylmer that almighty man,

Now what do we gain by this profanation of words which immemorial usage has consecrated to one purpose only? They overweight by their exaggeration the satire they were designed to point; and seem to realise on a small scale the celebrated definition of the crime, which contrived to be not only a crime but a blunder.

Again, nothing can be prettier than the description of Edith and Leolin's childhood, and, for our own part, we much admire the lines which tell us that in the romantic tales with which the boy amused his playmate

"A passion yet unborn perhaps Lay hidden as the music of the moon Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale."

But we do not think such an equivocal expression as the "music of the moon," so inevitably suggesting the "music of the spheres," should have been employed to designate that with which Philomel salutes the goddess of the night. And we must own we are much puzzled to understand in what sense the Indian

kinsman who presents Edith with the fatal dagger is called the "costly Sahib."

handsome gifts to his relatives was anything but costly to them; and large as may have been his pension, allude to it as a burden on the East we cannot think the poet meant to India Company. On the other hand, Edith among the poor forms a very fair picture :

A man who made such

"So lowly-lovely and so loving, Queenly responsive when the loyal hand Rose from the clay it work'd in as she past, Not sowing hedgerow texts and passing by, Nor dealing goodly counsel from a height That makes the lowest hate it, but a voice of comfort and an open hand of help, A splendid presence flattering the poor Revered as theirs, but kindlier than them

roofs

selves

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scorn,

In babyisms, and dear diminutives," &c.

and, as we must say, not wholly unprovoked. It is very trying even to a friendly mind to read other people's love-letters. What must it be to a hostile one? We can ourselves scarcely forgive those "dear diminutives." We may hope that these unlucky epistles contained none worse than Leo, Edy, and the like; but the expression reminds us painfully of the style of certain letters (rather amusing than instructive) which get every now and then published, to the confusion of their writers. In the last century letter-writing was a stately, grave, and formal thing, even amongst near relations. And we have no doubt that a gentleman of ancient family like Leolin, and the heiress of the good-breeding, though not of the pride, of the Aylmers, could write to one another without forgetting the established proprieties of their day.

Let us pass on to Edith's death, Her parents are in some degree guilty of it, for their unkindness has broken the young spirit's elasticity, which, if happier, might have conquered that low fever, which,

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"Darkly that day rose: Autumn's mock sunshine

of the faded

woods
Was all the life of it; for hard on these,
A breathless burden of low-folded Heavens
Stifled and chill'd at once."

What day fitter for sorrow than
one which derives its very bright-
ness from decay! The sermon itself
is fine; too fine in one sense; for
how could the rustics who listened
to it have understood its difficult
constructions and involved sen-
tences? But there is grandeur in
its stern denunciations of the idola-
tries of worldliness. There is burn-
ing power in the words which brand
that worshipper of self, whose flesh

"Fares richly, in fine linen,

even while

The deathless ruler of thy dying house
18 wounded to the death that cannot die;

feet,

Thee therefore with His light about thy
Thee with His message ringing in thine
Thee shall thy brother man, the Lord from

ears,

Heaven,

Born of a village girl, carpenter's son,
Wonderful, Prince of Peace, the Mighty
Count the more base idolater of the two,”

God,

The transition from the severity of
these words to the gentle tones of
lamentation over the dead is very
beautiful; eminently so when the
preacher describes her as

"Fairer than Rachel by the palmy well,
Fairer than Ruth among the fields of corn,
the Angel that said Hail!'' she
Fair as
seem'd,
Who entering filled the house with sudden
light."

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I made by these the last of all my race,

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Must cry to these the last of theirs, as cried
Christ ere His agony to those that swore
Not by the temple but the gold, and made
Their own traditions God, and slew the
Lord,

And left their memories a world's curse⚫ Behold,

Your house is left unto you desolate ?""

The bereaved mother sinks beneath the weight of these words, and is borne fainting from the church. The father, who in the earlier part of the discourse,

"When it seem'd he saw No pale sheet-lightnings from afar, but

fork'd

Of the near storm, and aiming at his head Bat anger-charmed from sorrow, soldierlike,

Erect:"

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Imbecile; his one word was 'desolate;" Dead for two years before his death was he."

We are not told with what feelings the rector read the funeral-service over the two parishioners whom he had insulted in their sorrow.

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We have not quoted by any means all the passages we admire in Aylmer's Field.' In point of execution, the more we consider this poem, the higher it rises in our estimation. Nevertheless we cannot help regarding its conclusion as a fresh proof that among the Laureate's many gifts, strong perceptions of dramatic fitness are not the most conspicuous. Averill's Sermon doubtless contains exactly what a man, situated as he was, could not help thinking; but no less certainly what a gentleman and a Christian would, when the mischief was done and the punishment had fallen, have scrupulously refrained from publicly expressing. Why pour the molten lead of those fierce denunciations into wounds yet deeper than his own? Why smite those afresh, whom God had smitten so terribly already? The preacher, arising from his own desolate hearth, like a Prophet of old, to denounce the crime which has laid it waste, is unquestionably a grandly tragic figure. But a deeper sense of the proprieties of character might have enabled its possessor to attain this fine effect without that perilous approach to the unreal and to the theatrical, by which, as it appears to us, it has been purchased in the present instance.

It is time to bestow a glance on the metrical experiments and precious bit of Homeric translation which form a sort of appendix to the volume. They will be a suitable introduction to our brief notice of the poem which we reserve as our favourite to the last, the place of honour.

The question whether any, and if any, which, of the Greek metres, yet unnaturalised, is capable of being permanently transplanted to the English Parnassus, has engaged

our great poets from the days of Spenser and Milton. It interests a very considerable section of the reading public at the present time. So, too, the lovers of the poets are inquiring, more and more eagerly, what is the fittest form in which to present the classical masterpieces to the modern reader? Now on both these questions Mr. Tennyson has a good right to be heard. A master of the English language, there are few now living who know its capabilities as he does. Many a passage in his poems testifies to his power of entering into the spirit of Homer. His Enone' and his Lotos-Eaters' bear witness that he can suffuse the marble forms of classic song with the warm glow of modern feeling, And therefore his verdict on the best method of reproducing the beauties of the ancient poets in English, deserves our most serious attention. So it is with great pleasure that we find ourselves able to quote the Laureate as an anthority against the perpetration of English hexameters. It is, we suppose, unquestionable that the translation of the poem should always be executed in the same metre as the original, provided that it is a metre which exists (or is capable of existing) in the language into which the translation is made. If, then, hexameters are a proper form of English verse, into them should Homer undoubtedly be translated. If, on the other hand, the substitution of accent for qnantity in modern languages has made true English hexameters impossible, we must fall back on the metre we should conceive Homer would have most likely chosen had he written in English. Mr. Tennyson imagines him using the un

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rhymed Iambic, the metre of the greatest English epic. The Spenserian stanza has of late been skilfully applied to the rendering of the 'Odyssey.' To others the fire of the origi al seems best represented in the long ballad-metres of fourteen or fifteen syllables, which are certainly in point of length the hexameter's English equivalents. For each of these views there is a good deal to be said; and we gladly take this opportunity of wishing all success to the versatile hand which has lately given us a specimen of a translation of the Iliad' in the last-named metre (that of Locksley Hall).* Let us also devoutly hope that similar good works may continue to employ that hand so well, that it may have no leisure for the political "mischief" which a nameless being is only too ready to find it to do when "idle!"

Certainly a complete translation of the Iliad' which should match that in the volume before us of the conclusion of its eighth book, would leave little to be desired. We cannot exhibit its excellence in a stronger point of view than by printing a few lines of it side by side with Pope's version of the same passage; with an assurance to the English reader that, except the omi-sion of one epithet, φαεινὴν (shining, radiant), applied to the moon, Mr. Tennyson's is literally exact. He will thus, on comparing the two, have ocular proof of the strange liberties which Pope took with his original, and of his want of feeling for its beauties; whilst he will admire the precisely opposite qualities of the Laureate as a translator of Homer:

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It is surprising that the writer of an otherwise able article in the 'Saturday Review,' should have confounded Mr. Gladstone's Trochaics of fifteen syllables with Chapman's Iambics of fourteen. The effect of the two lines is of course much the same to the eye, but to the ear they differ very greatly indeed.

We are inclined to accept the alternative offered to us of "ridge." It seems

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