The Gardener's Daughter.

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attempt to convey a true impression of them without exhibiting this detail in characteristic passages, as it would be to make a person feel all the subtle and penetrating grace and sweetness of a Raffaelle Madonna by description, or to transfuse into words the glory and power of Titian's colours. After all that philosophical critics have talked of organic unity, and such-like hard phrases, since Coleridge influenced English criticism, and allowing all the importance that belongs to the facts expressed, or intended to be expressed, by the phrases, it must be admitted that the finest construction would produce little effect in poetry without fine details; and that where the genius for producing these exists, the art or instinct which combines them will seldom be wanting when the poet is mature. The real truth is, that what is often called fine detail is nothing but tawdry ornament,-the feeble or vehement effort to say fine things without having fine thoughts,-to utter raptures that are insincere and unreal, inasmuch as the imaginative power to summon up the beautiful objects supposed to justify the rapture is wanting, and the would-be poet has before him merely the general conceptions of beautiful objects, to which he applies, consequently, mere general conventional phrases. Mr. Tennyson's phrases, on the contrary, are pictures; and his rhythm the natural music of a mind rejoicing in the beauty of the pictures that flow in ordered continuity and fullness before him. The unflagging activity of this pictorial power is manifested frequently in Mr. Tennyson's poems, by the slightest change from the ordinary phrase, as has been noticed in Morte d'Arthur. Here, again, in The Gardener's Daughter,

My Eustace might have sat for Hercules

So muscular he spread, so broad of breast,— where the spread gives not the mere statement of a fact, but its actual appearance; the space fills before the eye with the bulky frame of the man, as we look.

In describing the locality of the garden, Mr. Tennyson fills the mind with the realities of the place. We know the distance from the city by hearing the funeral and marriage bells and the clanging of the minster clock, borne upon the wind; by looking out along a league of grass. The nature of the country and the time of year are given in the slow, broad stream, with its floating lilies, its pleasure skiffs, and its barges; in the rich grass meadows with their pasturing cattle, and their low-hanging lime trees in flower, humming with winged life. And to complete the picture thus presented, the extreme distance is filled by the three-arched bridge, with the minster towers rising above it

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies

A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream,
That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge
Crown'd with the minster-towers.

The fields between

Are dewy-fresh, brows'd by deep-udder'd kine,
And all about the large lime feathers low,

The lime a summer home of murmurous wings.

A landscape by Constable or De Wint would not bring the scene more clearly before the eye, or with more of the quiet truth of happy, but unimpassioned observation. But it is the high prerogative of poetry that she can throw over nature the 'wedding garment or the shroud,' and exhibit landscape as it is coloured by emotion. It would be rash to assert perfection of anything human; but the following description of a country walk on a May morning, under the influence of the premonition of a first passion, before the subjective excitement is determined to and concentrated upon its proper object, approaches that limit. Since

Adam first

Embraced his Eve, in happy hour,

love was ever the great ideal artist, at whose touch Every bird of Eden burst

In carol, every bud in flower;

but he never painted a more glowing picture of a mind full of the bliss that is half-sister to desire, or of a nature reflecting the bliss in a thousand beautiful sights and sounds than this:

And sure this orbit of the memory folds
For ever in itself the day we went
To see her. All the land in flowery squares,
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind,
Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud
Drew downward: but all else of Heaven was pure
Up to the Sun, and May from verge to verge,
And May with me from head to heel.
As though 'twere yesterday, as though it were
The hour just flown, that morn with all its sound,
(For those old Mays had thrice the life of these,)

And now,

The Gardener's Daughter.

Rings in mine ears. The steer forgot to graze,
And, where the hedge-row cuts the pathway, stood,
Leaning his horns into the neighbour field,

And lowing to his fellows.

From the woods

Came voices of the well-contented doves,

The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy,
But shook his song together as he near'd

His happy home, the ground. To left and right,
The cuckoo told his name to all the hills;
The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm;

The redcap whistled; and the nightingale

Sang loud, as though he were the bird of day.

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We have minute touches, bringing out common objects with a passing glory that catches without chaining the attention, as well as those finished pictures upon which the mind dwells with a fixed delight of contemplation; touches that charm us with their truth, and help to mark the whole scene in its distinction of season and weather. Here are two from a crowd of such. From the lilac in crowded bloom

One warm gust, full-fed with perfume, blew
Beyond us, as we entered in the cool.

A cedar spread his dark-green layer of shade.
The garden glasses shone, and momently
The twinkling laurels scattered silver lights;

where the epithet silver admirably expresses the metallic glitter of the laurel leaves in the sun, compared with the deader green of ordinary foliage.

The last night's gale,' which had blown the rose-tree across the walk, may have been introduced mainly to give Rose a graceful occupation, and to justify a charming picture. But even if that were its main purpose, it no less contributes a fact which accounts for the marvellous transparency of the May morning, the clearness of the atmosphere shedding rapture through the veins and hearts of all living things. Applied to most poets, such an observation would savour of over-refining, but Tennyson's never-aimless minuteness justifies it.

In the picture of Rose which follows, Mr. Tennyson has, with the true instinct of genius, avoided attempting to paint in words a beautiful human face, while he preserves dramatic propriety in not making a lover at the first glance master the expression of the countenance he afterwards knows in all its meanings. The painter-lover would be at once attracted to the picturesque attitude, general effect of dress, light and shade, the contour of the figure, and the bright points of colour

One arm aloft,

Gown'd in pure white, that fitted to the shape-
Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood.
A single stream of all her soft brown hair
Pour'd on one side: the shadow of the flowers
Stole all the golden gloss, and, wavering
Lovingly lower, trembled on her waist-
Ah, happy shade-and still went wavering down,
But, ere it touch'd a foot, that might have danced
The greensward into greener circles, dipt,
And mix'd with shadows of the common ground!
But the full day dwelt on her brows, and sunn'd
Her violet eyes, and all her Hebe-bloom,
And doubled his own warmth against her lips,
And on the bounteous wave of such a breast
As never pencil drew. Half light, half shade,

She stood, a sight to make an old man young.

With what exquisite feeling is the progress of the love associated with the imagery of the garden in which the loved, one hoarded in herself, grew, seldom seen,'

The daughters of the year,

One after one, thro' that still garden pass'd:
Each garlanded with her peculiar flower
Danced into light, and died into the shade;
And each in passing touch'd with some new grace
Or seem'd to touch her, so that day by day,

Like one that never can be wholly known,

Her beauty grew;

and in that line, 'like one that never can be wholly known,' is revealed one exhaustless charm in all our true personal relations. Things, as things, soon weary us, because we soon know all we can ever know about them; persons are ever new, ever unfolding to us something unexpected, as they become dearer to us, and we look at them with eyes opened by sympathy and affection. Only the view of the universe, as a revelation of a personal being, supplies to outward objects exhaustless variety and interest.

The

The law of reserve which rules this poem has been already alluded to. It requires neither art nor genius to raise emotion of a low kind in a reader, if a writer has no reserve. mind is sufficiently awake in all of us to realize pictures that appeal to the sensual passions; and a writer has no more difficulty in being powerful, if he give himself the licence of some poetry, than he has in being witty, if he copy Swift's unbridled profanity and beastliness. Mr. Tennyson's glory is to have portrayed passion with a feminine purity,—to have spiritualized the voluptuousness of the senses and the imagina

Limits of Mr. Tennyson's Poetry.

257

tion by a manly reverence for woman's worth, and a clear intuition of the perfect law of liberty' through which the true humanity develops itself in the form and condition of an animal nature. He religiously observes the sanctities of love, and in graceful pictures lays down the law which he respects:—

Would you learn at full

How passion rose thro' circumstantial grades
Beyond all grades develop'd? and indeed

I had not staid so long to tell you all,

But while I mused came Memory with sad eyes,
Holding the folded annals of my youth;

And while I mused, Love with knit brows went by,
And with a flying finger swept my lips,

6

And spake, Be wise: not easily forgiven.

Are those, who setting wide the doors, that bar

The secret bridal chambers of the heart,

Let in the day.' Here, then, my words have end.

And here must end our remarks upon The Gardener's Daughter. We can remember no love story that can be placed beside it in all its harmonious combination of excellences. Passion may have been dramatised more intensely; a subtle grace of sentiment, a charm of evanescent fragrance, may be felt more in some of Shelley's lyrics, and in some of Mr. Tennyson's own; character may certainly be given with more force of individuality; and unquestionably a story more exciting in its incidents has often been told by novelist and poet: but for its delineation of the first and last love of a happy man, whose moral nature has known nothing of conflicts with itself, and whose mind has been kept healthy by the delightful occupation of the painter; for its vivid descriptions of nature in some of her loveliest aspects; for the sense of perfect enjoyment that makes the verse flow on as a full stream through a rich meadow-land, and for the touching softening of the tone as the speaker tells of the present as a calm resting-place between a blessed memory and a blessed hope, it stands unrivalled in English literature. And yet it never deviates from the familiar path of our English daily life, and is just a simple picture of that life as a joyous heart and warm affection may make it for any of us.

The forms of poetry which Mr. Tennyson adopts are not capable of interpreting the more complex moral phenomena. To show that evil natures and evil actions have their appointed work in the world,

That somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt and taints of blood,—

S