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kind, may be admired, but they never can be popular. And when we hear men of unquestionable genius complain of not being appreciated by the herd, it is because they are not themselves skilled in the feelings of the herd. For what is knowledge of mankind but the knowledge of their feelings, their humors, their caprices, and their passions; touch these, and you gain attention,-develope these, and you have conquered your audience."

Alfred Tennyson, though possessing somewhat more of humor and earthliness than Shelley, would have committed nearly the same faults, had he not been restrained by their melancholy results, too obvious to escape his attention. The texture of his mind is of the same subtle and imaginative nature with that of the author of Prometheus and Adonais. His tendency to pursue metaphysical abstractions into vagueness and obscurity, is primarily the same with Shelley's, and could only have been checked-for that it is not subdued, may easily be seen from "The Two Voices" and the "Palace of Art"-by severe discipline and self-denial. It would require no extraordinary discrimination to judge from what model, among others, he has deduced his principles of poetical melody and rhythm. The same elements of vivid imagination, delicate and ethereal fancy, graceful personification, reach of thought, purity and nicety of diction, and harmony of allusion, which claim for Tennyson so high a rank among poets, may be found in Shelley in equal copiousness. And the reason why the one charms the wide people with so strong a spell, and enters so readily the heart of every one who cares at all for poetry; and why the other stands almost alone and neglected, is found in the fact that Shelley was careless of gaining access to the sympathies of human nature, and wrapping himself in a mantle of poetic abstractions, wondered why a world around him went famishing for truth; while Tennyson, no less rapt with the visions of the lofty heaven of song, studies to accommodate himself to the better tastes of a nation of listeners, and feeling that his powers cannot elevate his audience wholly to his own level, condescends a little, to meet them on a broader and more accessible plain, which it is his especial care to beautify and enrich.

Still the peculiar vein of metaphysical speculation which Tennyson shares with Shelley, and his evident love for indulging it-an indulgence that would run beyond bound were it acceptable to his audience-must prevent him from ever becoming, in the broadest use of the term, a popular poet. Unlike Burns, to whom he is superior in imagination and mental power, he would never be appealed to as a national favorite. Unlike Cowper, with whom it would be unjust to compare him, if we reckon imagination and delicacy of sentiment among the chief requisites of poetry, he would never be regarded by the mass as a companion and a friend in all seasons and places. Those who look for stories even in poetry, and measure the goodness of a poem by the intensity of its dramatic interest, will read "Marmion" and slight the "Princess." By the fireside Tennyson will often yield to Campbell; in circulating libraries he will be less thumbed than Montgomery; at the piano, less sung than Haynes Bayley; at the festive board, less quoted than Moore. Not exclusively a subject for the still researches of the study, he is a fit companion in those hours when we wish to refresh our mental faculties, hebetated by long intercourse with the world, from the pure and living wells of song; when we are disposed alike to enjoy the solemn argument, the playful and half-earnest

discourse, the sarcastic yet good-tempered judgment, the mirthful jest; at such times, whether by the glowing fire, or in the dreamy grove, he speaks to us with rare and strange power, and makes of us eager and devoted disciples.

Rightly distrusting his ability to master at once the secrets of grandeur and tenderness, Tennyson has chossn his province in the latter. I do not say that he is not often sublime, but that he does not aim at grasping the thunderbolt while he holds the key to the chambers of the zephyr. Nor does this argue excessive and timid humility, or real want of power. Since the days of Homer, no poet has been at the same time truly sublime and truly tender. Milton, from his grand and unapproachable seat, forbids us to weep, and looks with silent indifference on human sensibility. The Florentine bard, in his dark grandeur, is mournful, but not sympathe tic. Shakspeare approaches near perfection on either hand, and from him, as from the ancient Greek, we derive our models, yet we perceive that even Shakspeare would have the more excelled in part had he not aimed at all. And if the consummation of the lofty with the tender is not found here, where shall we look for it, or how can lesser mortals hope to attain it? The sublimity of Shelley, which he could unquestionably have brought to a much higher grade of excellence than he actually did, is distorted with wild vagaries, and chaotic images; and those passages in which he lavished the deepest affections of his heart upon the objects of his love, are marred by his excessive inclination for abstraction, and his intense and unsatisfied desire to express the unutterable. There are depths in the human heart to which language in vain strives to penetrate, and their most perfect expositor is he who reveals their presence by lighting up the surrounding obscurities. And thus it is, that by careful study and patient attention to popular wants, Tennyson has overcome much of that distance which lay between the world and himself-and which turned the earnest and disinterested love of Shelley back upon himself-and has learned the modes of access to the human heart. His delicate sympathy, his unaffected desire to interest, his keen appreciation of the beautiful, are felt and recognized by all whose minds are at all in harmony with poetry, or are not perverted by a false taste. Tennyson is emphatically the poet of tenderness and sensibility; but it is owing to his discrimination, and not to his genius alone, that his expressions of love are not met with indifference, or mistaken for madness.

Next to that metaphysical and abstract view of thought which forms so marked a characteristic of Shelley and Tennyson, I should place a love of harmony-a power over the resources of rhythm, as a peculiar distinction of their genius. That this is partly spontaneous, I cannot doubt, but it is equally clear that much of it is owing to an intimate acquaintance with the classic, and especially the Greek, poets.

Most writers of poetry, more especially the inexperienced, when inspired by the muse, compose hastily, without definite system, and without regard to the laws of metre. As they read verse by the ear, so they write it, and the chances are almost infinite against their accuracy. The natural affinity of the senses for harmony is generally sufficient to prevent mistakes occurring in very great numbers, or of very obvious magnitude; and much creditable poetry is produced in this way, but none of it is marked by the essentials of immortality. The writer who aims at permanence, strives for perfection. All our immortal authors, with one or two exceptions, were men of giant labor, and composed slowly; working by

the examples of the past, improving on models which in their turn had been the fruit of elaborate toil and study. The great laws of beauty are exacting, and a thorough knowledge of them is requisite to that success at which every writer should aim. Triumph gained without this knowledge is necessarily ephemeral. And although poems, that are hastily written, and disjointed, and marred by an absence of harmony here, and a disconnection of thought there, may be published, and read, and admired, they cannot live. Virgil and Horace complained that rival poets composed ten times faster than they, but somehow the world has given those fast geniuses the go-by. An author who expects posterity to read him, has no right to presume upon his own facility. The speed of the age is requisite in the pen that writes pamphlets, or editorials, or certain kinds of criticism; but for the sake of literature, let us not see it in poems or histories. He is a wise writer of poetry who ponders long and deeply on the stately and pure models of the Greeks, the massive specimens of Roman art, and the unyielding structures built by early English strength; who makes the laws of harmony familiar knowledge-who is equally at home in the smooth and solemn flow of blank verse, and the involved torrent of the choral ode. If each verse is perfect, there will be no flaw in the entire work. The genius that constructs without art, is but an imperfect exposi

tor of itself.

Shelley's command of melody was great, and his intimacy with classic beauty wonderful. The Grecian dramatists were his especial delight, and his admiration of their exquisite taste and severe simplicity was carried almost to idolatry. His Prometheus seems almost the work of Eschylus himself, and the Cenci is as perfect a model of composition as the Antigone, and as unfit for representation on the English stage. In many of his compositions he was hasty, and his sudden and early death prevented him from revising what he could not but have recognized as unfinished and .crude. But where he has displayed his strength, the flow of his melody is surpassed by nothing in the English language. The perusal of "Alastor" or "Adonais" affects us like the solemn chanting of some mysterious anthem, filling us with lofty but indefinable conceptions, bewildering us in a maze of reverberating echoes. Such music is a fit companion to those abstract thoughts which, flowing in vivid profusion from the poet, elude all the powers of the mind but the imagination. Judgment alone might as well sit on a conception of Mozart as of Shelley. To translate either into prose would be impossible.

In excellence of metrical construction and use of melody, Tennyson is not at all inferior to Shelley, and his power of entrancing the ear is often much enhanced by the accommodation of his thoughts to the popular taste. Thus, while "Enone" and portions of "In Memoriam" are as melodious and as abstract as "Alastor;" "Mariana" and the "Miller's Daughter" are to the latter what "Sweet Home" is to the "Creation." And with so much care and thought and deliberation has Tennyson elaborated his productions, that there can be found among them fewer imperfections of rhythm and style than in those of any other English poet. That this by itself is not necessarily an all-important feature, is evident from the fact that many of the imitators of Pope, who, if they had lived before the Dunciad, might have thought themselves fortunate to obtain a place in its embalming pages, composed rhymes of undeniable smoothness, and not without a semblance of musical flow; still when joined, as in this case, with genius and high poetical inspiration, it must be recognized as a

powerful element of enduring success. It is a matter of praise to any poet of the present day, that he carefully attends to the laws of metrical construction, and strives after effect in language as well as in thought; since by a large and brilliant and influential school of poets, they have been, in late years, so much disregarded.

In attempting to give a favorable specimen of the verse of Shelley, I shall meet with more difficulty than in the task of elucidating my ideas of Tennyson. The finest passages of the former are precisely those which, in a disconnected form, would give the least satisfaction to the general reader, both on account of their abstractedness and the intimate relations of thought they maintain with the context. We shall confine ourselves to a single example-narrative-and affording a beautiful instance of sound harmonizing with sense. It is from "Alastor."

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The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues
High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray,
That canopied his path o'er the waste deep;
Twilight, ascending slowly from the east,
Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locks
O'er the fair front and radiant eyes of day;
Night followed, clad with stars. On every side
More horribly the multitudinous streams
Of ocean's mountainous waste to mutual war
Rush'd in dark tumult thundering, as to mock
The calm and spangled sky. The little boat
Still fled before the storm; still fled like foam
Down the steep cataract of a wintry river :
Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave,
Now leaving far behind the bursting mass
That fell, convulsing ocean. Safely fled—
As if that frail and wasted human form
Had been an elemental god.

At midnight

The moon arose; and lo! the ethereal cliffs

Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone

Among the stars like sunlight, and around

Whose caverned base the whirlpools and the waves

Bursting and eddying irresistibly,

Rage and resound for ever.-Who shall save ?

The boat fled on-the boiling torrent drove—

The crags closed round with black and jagged arms,

The shattered mountain overhung the sea,

And faster still, beyond all human speed,

Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave,
The little boat was driven."

From the early and bitterly atoned errors of Shelley's life, and his subsequent trials, Tennyson has been happily exempt; nor has he shared those torturing speculations and wild scepticisms-whose full terror no one knows who has not experienced them--with the author of that most melancholy of all youthful follies, Queen Mab. Over the career of Shelley we hang with mingled reverence and sorrow, venerating his genius, and lamenting his mournful lapses from the true faith, not without hopefulness that his deep and sincere love for goodness was acceptable to Him who sees not as man sees; on the upward and brightening path of Tennyson we look only exultingly, recognizing the progress of a great—and a Christian-poet. B.

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ILLUSIONS OF A TOURIST:

BEING REMINISCENCES OF A VISIT TO THE GREAT SAINT BERNARD.

[FROM THE FRENCH OF TOPFFER.]

We were seated, in company with the prior, at the convent of St. Bernard, with our feet against the fire. The good ecclesiastic, after many narratives elicited by our inquiries, observed: "Moreover, gentlemen, our Saint Bernard is rather celebrated, than well known." "And I can tell you the reason, father," interrupted a stout gentleman, who, seated on the right hand side of the hearth, had not yet shared the conversation; "it is not well known, because it has been so often misrepresented. It is with your famous mountain as with so many authors of the present day, who are also celebrated, and whom we, the public, know through the medium of newspapers, biographies and engravings; the newspapers indulge in romance, the biographies in falsehood, the portraits in flattery; in fact, the whole concern is as false as an epitaph!"

The gentleman ceased; but I, who consider myself one of the public also, and have, as such, my own ideas and convictions-I felt somewhat nettled by the confident abruptness with which his opinion was uttered: "Allow me," said I,-"epitaphs"- But he did not permit me to conclude the sentence. "Epitaphs! would you really undertake to defend them? then I would send you to walk (I started, and my countenance must, I am certain, have displayed some marks of indignation) for an hour only in the cemetery of Pere-La Chaise. You will hardly deny, sir, that there are some devils sleeping there beneath the turf. Well! the epitaphs speak only of angels."

"Possibly," said I, "but we may suppose that the survivors, in the exeess of their grief" he interrupted me again-"You are young, sir; very young. You have yet to learn that it is never grief, but always pride, vanity or joy, that dictates these falsehoods and pays for their perpetration." I replied, "Vanity, perhaps; but joy, sir, joy in connexion with a cemetery-with a tomb!" "Joy, sir, or gratification if you like it better; that solid, actual gratification, which results from a rich inheritance. By a natural sentiment, possessing, however, nothing in common with grief, we wish to acknowledge, in some manner, the benefit which we receive, and the epitaph is selected for that purpose. Of all means, this is the most convenient, the least expensive, and hence, the most ancient. Grave, grave, then, sculptor; proclaim the virtues; proceed; discharge the tribute of what, gentlemen, unless it be of our gratitude to the deceased, our perfect and entire satisfaction, our gratification, the warmer and more lively, because for the present we are not allowed to dispel it?"

"There are monsters," replied I, "who are thus constituted, but""Recall the word, young man, and reserve it for more odious subjects. That which is a misery inherent in humanity, cannot justly be called monstrous. I speak of every day facts; of selfishness rather odious than un

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