Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 402, April, 1849
It is especially in the class of descriptive poetry, that we moderns have carried the over-refinement we are speaking of, to so remarkable an extent. The poets of Greece and Rome, it has been often observed, rarely, if ever, described natural scenery simply for its own sake. It was with their verse as with their paintings – the landscape was always a mere accessory, the main interest lying with the human or superhuman beings who inhabited it. The truth seems to be, that the pagan imagination was so full of its goddesses and nymphs, that these obscured the genuine impression, which the scene itself would have produced. Not but that the ancient poet must have felt the charm of a beautiful or sublime scene; but instead of dwelling upon this natural charm, he turned immediately to what seemed a more worthy subject – to the supernatural beings with which superstition had peopled the scene. Scarcely could he see the wood for the dryads, or the river for those smooth naiads that were surely living in its lucid depths. And even if we suppose that these pagan faiths had lost their hold both of writer and of reader, it is still very easy to understand that simple nature – trees, and hills, and water – however pleasing to the beholder, might not be thought an appropriate subject, or one sufficiently important for an exclusive description. What is open to every one's eye, and familiar to every man's thought, is not the first, but the last topic to which literature resorts. Not till all others are exhausted does it betake itself to this. Just as the heroic in human existence would be sung and resung, long before a Fielding portrays the common life that is lying about him; so portents and prodigies, gods and satyrs, and Ovidian fables of metamorphosed damsels, would precede the description of groves and bays, verdure and water, and the light of heaven seen shining every day upon them.
Even the sacred poets and prophets amongst the Hebrews, who gave such sublime views of nature, always associated her with the presence of God. This, indeed, was the secret of their sublimity. With them nature was never seen alone. The clouds rolled about His else invisible path; the thunder was His, the hills were His; nature was the perpetual vesture of the Deity.
It is only in modern times that the scenery of nature has been allowed to speak for itself, to make its own impression, as the great representative of the Beautiful here below. But now, as this scenery is to be described, not by admeasurements, or the items of a catalogue, as so much land, so much water, so much timber, but by the deep, and varied, and often shadowy sentiments it calls forth, it is manifest that it must become a theme inexhaustible to the poet, and a theme also somewhat dangerous to him, as tempting him more and more towards those refined, and vague, and evanescent feelings which are not found on the highways of human thought, and are known only to the experience of a few.
But to return more immediately to Mr Tennyson. We have said that, at the time when he commenced writing, poetry was in a certain feverish condition. The young poet had been spoilt – had grown over-confident. He was like Spencer's Knight in the Palace of Love, who sees written over every door, "Be bold! Be bold!" Only over one door does he read the salutary caution, "Be not too bold!" Public opinion, or the opinion of a large and powerful coterie, favoured his wildest excesses. That language was strained and distorted, was a sure sign of the original power of thought that was struggling through the imperfect medium. Obscurity was always honoured. People strained their eyes to watch their favourite as he careered amongst the clouds: if they lost sight of him, the fault was presumed to be in their own vision; they were not likely, therefore, to confess any inability to follow him. The young aspirants of the day even learnt to despise the trammels of their own art. The measure and melody of their verse was sacrificed to the irresistible afflatus which bore them onward. Metre was put to the torture, – at least our ears were tortured – in order that no iota of the heaven-breathed strain should be lost. They still wrote in verse, because verse alone could disguise the empty, meaningless phraseology they had enlisted in their service; but it was often a jingling rhythm, harsher to the ear than the most crabbed prose, which was retained as an excuse or concealment for that resplendent gibberish they had imported so largely into the English language. From a super-refinement of thought, altogether transcendental, they delighted to descend to an imitation of childish or antique simplicity. The natural level of cultivated thought was by all means to be avoided. If you were not in the clouds, you must be seen sitting amongst the buttercups.
Turn now to the opening and earlier poems in Mr Tennyson's volume; they are considerably altered from the state in which they made their first appearance, but they still leave traces enough of the unfortunate influence we have attempted to describe. The best amongst them is a sort of gallery of portraits of fair ladies – Claribel, and Lilian, and Isabel, and Adeline, and Madeline, and others. From these might be extracted some few very beautiful lines, but none of them pleases as a whole. There is an air of effort and elaboration, coupled with much studied negligence, which prevents us from surrendering ourselves to the charms of any of these portraitures. The Claribel, with which the volume commences, might be a woman or a child for anything that the poem tells us; we only gather from the expression "low lieth," that she is dead, and over her grave there rings a chime of words, which leave as little impression on the living ear as they would on the sleeper beneath. It was a pity – since alterations have been permitted – that the volume was still allowed to open with this mere monotonous chant. And why were these two absurd songs To the Owl still preserved? Was it to display a sort of moral courage, and as they were first written out of bravado to common sense, was it held a point of honour to persist in their republication? I, Tennyson, have written good things; therefore this, my nonsense, shall hold its ground in spite of the murmurs of gentle reader, or the anger of malignant critic! But we must not commence an inquisition of this kind, nor ask why this or that has been permitted to remain, for we should carry on such an inquiry to no little extent. We should make wide clearance in this first part of his volume. Here is a long Ode to Memory, which craves to be extinguished, which ought in charity to be forgotten. An utter failure throughout. We cannot read it again, to enable us to speak quite positively, but we do not think there is a single redeeming line in the whole of it. A dreary, shapeless, metaphysical mist lies over it; there is no object seen, and not a ray of beauty even colours the cloud. Then comes an odious piece of pedantry in the shape of "A Song." What metre, Greek or Roman, Russian or Chinese, it was intended to imitate, we have no care to inquire: the man was writing English, and had no justifiable pretence for torturing our ear with verse like this: —
Song
"A spirit haunts the year's last hours,
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh,
In the walks.
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers."
Of the Lady of Shalott we have already hinted our opinion. They must be far gone in dilettantism who can make an especial favourite of such a caprice as this – with its intolerable vagueness, and its irritating repetition, every verse ending with the "Lady of Shalott," which must always rhyme with "Camelot." We cannot conceive what charm Mr Tennyson could find in this species of odious iteration, which he nevertheless repeatedly inflicts upon us. It matters not what precedent he may insist upon – whether he quotes the authority of Theocritus, or the worthy example of old English ballad-makers – the annoyance is none the less. In a poem called The Sisters, we have the verse framed after this fashion: —
"We were two daughters of one race;
She was the fairest in the face:
The wind is blowing in turret and tree.
They were together, and she fell;
Therefore revenge became me well.
O the earl was fair to see!"
And so we go on to the end of the chapter, with "The wind is blowing in turret and tree," and "The earl was fair to see," brought in, no matter how, but always in the same place. The rest of the verse is not so abundantly clear as to be well able to afford this intervenient jingle, which is indeed no better than the fal lal la! or tol de rol! of facetious drinking-songs. These have their purpose, being framed expressly for people in that condition when they want noise, and noise only, when the absence of all sense is rather a merit; but what earthly use, or beauty, or purpose there can be in the melancholy iterations of Mr Tennyson, we cannot understand. Certainly we agree here with Hotspur – we would rather hear "a kitten cry Mew, than one of these same metre ballad-mongers."
Oriana is fashioned on the same plan: —
"My heart is wasted with my woe,
Oriana.
There is no rest for me below,
Oriana."
As if some miserable dog were baying the moon with the name of Oriana.
Mariana in the Moated Grange is not by any means improved by this habit of repetition, every stanza ending with the same lines, and those not too skilfully constructed: —
"She only said, 'My life is dreary;
He cometh not,' she said!
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!'"
This piece of Mariana has been very much extolled; the praise we should allot to it would seem cold after the applause it has frequently received. The descriptive powers of Tennyson are, in his happiest moments, unrivalled; on these occasions there is no one of whom it may be said more accurately, that his words paint the scene; but the description here and in the subsequent piece, Mariana in the South, has always appeared to us too studied to be entirely pleasing. We have tried to feel it, but we could not.
For instances of graver faults of style, and in productions of higher aim, we should point, amongst others, to The Palace of Art, The Vision of Sin, The Dream of Fair Women. In all of these, verses of great merit may be found, but the larger part is very faulty. An obscurity, the result sometimes of too great condensation of style, and a jerking spasmodic movement, constantly mar the effect. From The Palace of Art we quote, almost at haphazard, the following lines. The soul has built her palace, has hung it with pictures, and placed therein certain great bells, (a sort of music we do not envy her,) that swing of themselves. It is then finely said of her —
"She took her throne,
She sat betwixt the shining oriels
To sing her songs alone."
After this the strain thus proceeds: —
"No nightingale delighteth to prolong
Her low preamble all alone,
More than my soul to hear her echoed song
Throb through the ribbed stone;
"Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth,
Trying to feel herself alive;
Lord over nature, lord of the visible earth,
Lord of the senses five.
"Communing with herself: 'All these are mine;
And let the world have peace or wars,
'Tis one to me.' She – when young night divine
Crown'd dying day with stars,
"Making sweet close of his delicious toils —
Lit light in wreaths and anadems,
And pure quintessences of precious oils
In hallow'd moons of gems,
"To mimic heaven; and clapt her hands, and cried,
'I marvel if my still delight
In this great house, so royal, rich, and wide,
Be flattered to the height.
"'From shape to shape at first within the womb,
The brain is modell'd,' she began,
'And through all phases of all thought I come
Into the perfect man.
"'All nature widens upward, evermore
The simpler essence lower lies;
More complex is more perfect, owning more
Discourse, more widely wise.'
"Then of the moral instinct would she prate,
And of the rising from the dead,
As hers by right of full-accomplish'd Fate;
And at the last she said – "
Now this surely is not writing which can commend itself to the judgment of any impartial critic. One cannot possibly admire this medley of topics, moral and physiological, thrown pell-mell together, and mingled with descriptions which are themselves a puzzle to understand. To hear one's own voice "throbbing through the ribbed stone," is a startling novelty in acoustics, and the lighting up of the apartment is far from being a lucid affair. We can understand "the wreaths and anadems;" our experience of an illumination-night in the streets of London, where little lamps or jets of gas, assume these festive shapes, comes to our aid, but "moons of gems" would form such globes as even the purest quintessence of the most precious oil must fail to render very luminous.
The Vision of Sin commences after this fashion: —
"I had a vision when the night was late:
A youth came riding toward a palace-gate;
He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown,
But that his heavy rider kept him down.
And from the palace came a child of sin,
And took him by the curls, and led him in,
Where sat a company with heated eyes,
Expecting when a fountain should arise."
Thus it commences, and thus it proceeds for some time, in the same very intelligible strain. It is our fault, perhaps, that we cannot interpret the vision; but we confess that we can make nothing of it till the measure suddenly changes, and we have a bitter, mocking, sardonic song, a sort of devil's drinking-song, through which some species of meaning becomes evident enough.
In a vision of sin we may count upon a little mystery; but we should expect to find all clear and beautiful in A Dream of Fair Women. But here, too, everything is singularly misty. Those who have witnessed that ingenious exhibition called The Dissolving Views, will recollect that gay and gaudy obscurity which intervenes at the change of each picture; they will remember that they passed half their time looking upon a canvass covered with indistinct forms, and strangely mingled colours. Just for a few minutes the picture stands out bright and well defined as need be, then it breaks up, and confuses its dim fragments with the colours of some other picture, which is now struggling to make itself visible. Half our time is spent amongst mingled shadows of the two, the eye in vain attempting to trace any perfect outline. Precisely such a sensation the perusal of this, and some other of the poems of Tennyson, produces on the reader. For a moment the scene brightens out into the most palpable distinctness, but for the greater part we are gazing on a glittering mist, where there is more colour than form, and where the colours themselves are flung one upon the other in lawless profusion. In the Dream of Fair Women, the form of Cleopatra stands forth magnificently; it is almost the only portion of the poem that has the great charm of distinctness, or which fixes itself permanently on the memory.
We cannot bring ourselves to quote line after line, and verse after verse, of what we hold to be bad and unreadable: we have given some examples, and mentioned a considerable number of the pieces, on which we should found a certain vote of censure; the intelligent reader can easily check our judgment by his own, – confirm or dispute it. We turn to what is a more grateful task. Well known as these poems are, we must be permitted to give a few specimens of those happy efforts which have secured, we believe, to Tennyson, in spite of the defects we have pointed out, an enduring place amongst the poets of England. We shall make our selection so as to illustrate his success in very different styles, and on different topics. We shall make this selection from the volume of The Poems, and then dwell separately, and somewhat more at large, upon The Princess, which is comparatively a late publication.
We cannot pass by our especial favourite, The Lotos-Eaters. This is poetry of the very highest order – in every way charming – subject and treatment both. The state of mind described, is one which every cultivated mind will understand and enter into, and which a poet, in particular, must thoroughly sympathise with – that lassitude which is content to look upon the swift-flowing current of life, and let it flow, refusing to embark thereon – a lassitude which is not wholly torpor, which has mental energy enough to cull a justification for itself from all its stores of philosophy – a lassitude charming as the last thought, before sleep quite folds us in its safe and tried oblivion. No need to eat of the Lotos, or to be cast upon the enchanted island, to feel this gentle despondency, this resignation made up of resistless indolence and well-reasoned despair. Yet these are circumstances which add greatly to the poetry of our picture. To the band of weary navigators who had disembarked upon this land —
"Where all things always seemed the same —
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
IV
"Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
To each; but whoso did receive of them,
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave,
Far, far away, did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
And deep asleep he seemed, yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.
V
"They sat them down upon the yellow sand,
Between the sun and moon, upon the shore;
And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,
Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore
Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, 'We will return no more;'
And all at once they sang, 'Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.'"
CHORIC SONG
I
"There is sweet music here, that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And through the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leav'd flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.
II
"Why are we weighed upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone?
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown:
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm;
Nor hearken what the inner spirit sings, —
'There is no joy but calm!'
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?
IV
"Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life: ah! why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence, – ripen, fall, and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease!"
VI
"Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,
And dear the last embraces of our wives,
And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change;
For surely now our household hearths are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes over-bold
Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings
Before them of the ten years' war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.
Is there confusion in the little isle?
Let what is broken so remain.
The gods are hard to reconcile:
'Tis hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labour unto aged breath.".
VIII
"We have had enough of action; and of motion, we,
Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind."
As at once a companion and counterpart to this picture, we have a noble strain from Ulysses, who, having reached his island-home and kingdom, pants again for enterprise – for wider fields of thought and action.
"It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly.
I am become a name;
For, always roaming with a hungry heart,
Much have I seen and known; cities of men,
And manners, climates, councils, governments;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
"This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port: the vessel puffs his sail:
There gloom the dark-blue seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads – you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die."
St Simeon Stylites is a poem strongly and justly conceived, and written throughout with sustained and equable power. Those who have objected to it, that it is not the portrait of any Christian even of that distant age and that Eastern clime, have perhaps not sufficiently consulted their ecclesiastical history, or sufficiently reflected how almost inevitably the practice of penances and self-inflictions leads to the idea that these are, in fact, a sort of present payment for the future joys of heaven. Such an idea most assuredly prevailed amongst the Eastern eremites, of whom our Simeon was a most noted example. But we cannot quote from this, or from The Two Voices, or from Locksley Hall, or from Clara Vere de Vere; for we wish now to select some specimen of the lighter, more playful, and graceful manner of our poet. We pause betwixt The Day-Dream and The Talking Oak; they are both admirable: we choose the latter – we rest under its friendly, sociable shade, and its most musical of boughs. The lover holds communion with the good old oak-tree, and finds him the most amiable as well as the most discreet of confidants. May every lover find his oak-tree talk as well, and as agreeably, and give a report as welcome of his absent fair one! On being questioned —
"If ever maid or spouse
As fair as my Olivia, came
To rest beneath thy boughs,"
The oak makes answer: —
"O Walter, I have sheltered here
Whatever maiden grace
The good old summers, year by year,
Made ripe in summer-chase:
"Old summers, when the monk was fat,
And, issuing shorn and sleek,
Would twist his girdle tight, and pat
The girls upon the cheek;
"And I have shadow'd many a group
Of beauties, that were born
In teacup-times of hood and hoop,
Or while the patch was worn;
"And leg and arm, with love-knots gay,
About me leap'd and laugh'd
The modish Cupid of the day,
And shrill'd his tinsel shaft.
"I swear (and else may insects prick
Each leaf into a gall)
This girl for whom your heart is sick
Is three times worth them all;
"I swear by leaf, and wind, and rain,
(And hear me with thy ears,)
That though I circle in the grain
Five hundred rings of years —
"Yet since I first could cast a shade
Did never creature pass
So slightly, musically made,
So light upon the grass:
"For as to fairies, that will flit
To make the greensward fresh,
I hold them exquisitely knit,
But far too spare of flesh."
The lover proceeds to inquire when it was that Olivia last came to "sport beneath his boughs;" and the oak, who from his topmost branches could see over into Summer-place, and look, it seems, in at the windows, gives him full information. Yesterday her father had gone out —
"But as for her, she staid at home,
And on the roof she went,
And down the way you use to come,
She look'd with discontent.
"She left the novel, half uncut,
Upon the rosewood shelf;
She left the new piano shut;
She could not please herself.
"Then ran she, gamesome as a colt,
And livelier than a lark;
She sent her voice through all the holt
Before her, and the park.
"A light wind chased her on the wing,
And in the chase grew wild;
As close as might be would he cling
About the darling child.
"But light as any wind that blows,
So fleetly did she stir,
The flower she touch'd on dipt and rose,
And turn'd to look at her.
"And here she came, and round me play'd,
And sang to me the whole
Of those three stanzas that you made
About my 'giant bole;'
"And, in a fit of frolic mirth,
She strove to span my waist;
Alas! I was so broad of girth
I could not be embraced.
"I wish'd myself the fair young beech,
That here beside me stands,
That round me, clasping each in each,
She might have lock'd her hands."
It is all equally charming, but we can proceed no further. Of the comic, we have hinted that Mr Tennyson is not without some specimens, though, as will be easily imagined, it is not a vein in which he frequently indulges. Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue is not a piece much to our taste, yet that
"Head-waiter of the chophouse here,
To which I most resort,"
together with the scene in which he lives and moves, is very graphically brought before us in the following lines: —
But thou wilt never move from hence,
The sphere thy fate allots:
Thy latter days, increased with pence,
Go down among the pots.
Thou battenest by the greasy gleam
In haunts of hungry sinners,
Old boxes, larded with the steam
Of thirty thousand dinners.
"We fret, we fume, would shift our skins,
Would quarrel with our lot;
Thy care is under-polish'd tins
To serve the hot-and-hot.
To come and go, and come again,
Returning like the pewit,
And watch'd by silent gentlemen
That trifle with the cruet."
But this is not the extract we promised our readers, nor the one we should select as the best illustration of our author's powers in this style. In a piece called Walking to the Mail, there occurs the following description of a certain college trick played on some miserly caitiff, who, no doubt, had richly deserved this application of Lynch law. It is not unlike the happiest manner of our old dramatists, —
"I was at school – a college in the south:
There lived a flay-flint near; we stole his fruit,
His hens, his eggs; but there was law for us;
We paid in person. He had a sow, sir: she
With meditative grunts of much content,
Lay great with pig, wallowing in sun and mud.
By night we dragg'd her to the college tower
From her warm bed, and up the cork-screw stair,
With hand and rope we haled the groaning sow,
And on the leads we kept her till she pigg'd.
Large range of prospect had the mother sow,
And but for daily loss of one she lov'd,
As one by one we took them – but for this,
As never sow was higher in this world,
Might have been happy: but what lot is pure?
We took them all, till she was left alone
Upon her tower, the Niobe of swine,
And so returned unfarrow'd to her sty."
The Princess; a Medley, now claims our attention. This can no longer, perhaps, be regarded as a new publication, yet, being the latest of Mr Tennyson's, some account of it seems due from us. With what propriety he has entitled it "A Medley" is not fully seen till the whole of it has come before the reader; and it is at the close of the poem that the author, sympathising with that something of surprise which he is conscious of having excited, explains in part how he fell into that half-serious, half-bantering style, and that odd admixture of modern and mediæval times, of nineteenth century notions and chivalrous manners, which characterise it, and constitute it the medley that it is. Accident, it seems, must bear the blame, if blame there be. The poem grew, we are led to gather, from some chance sketch or momentary caprice. So we infer from the following lines, —
"Here closed our compound story, which at first,
Perhaps, but meant to banter little maids
With mock heroics and with parody;
But slipt in some strange way, cross'd with burlesque
From mock to earnest, even into tonesOf tragic."
– However it grew, it is a charming medley; and that purposed anachronism which runs throughout, blending new and old, new theory and old romance, lends to it a perpetual piquancy. Speaking more immediately and critically of its poetic merit, what struck us on its perusal was this, that the pictures it presents are the most vivid imaginable; that here there is an originality and brilliancy of diction which quite illuminates the page; that everything which addresses itself to the eye stands out in the brightest light before us; but that, where the author falls into reflection and sentiment, he is not equal to himself; that here a slow creeping mist seems occasionally to steal over the page; so that, although the poem is not long, there are yet many passages which might be omitted with advantage. As to that peculiar abrupt style of narrative which the author adopts, it has, at all events, the merit of extreme brevity, and must find its full justification, we presume, in that half-burlesque character which is impressed upon the whole poem.