dynamically related, so that the landscape is described as seen and felt by the persons of the scene, under the influence of some emotion which selects objects congenial to its own moods, and modifies their generic appearances, if the word generic may be used to express the appearance objects present to a mind in its ordinary, unexcited state. And thus we get a landscape which is at once ideal and real -a collection of actual images of external nature, grouped and coloured by a dominant idea; and the whole composition derives from this principle a harmony and a force of expression which, whether the principal aim be landscape painting or the delineation of human emotion, produce that dramatic unity demanded in works of art. Employed as the principle is in this early volume upon scenery that is strange and upon emotions that are not human, it yet shows its power of producing a picture throughout harmoniously conceived, and evidences a capacity for concentration that only needs substantially interesting material to work upon. The poem which, better than any other in the first series, exhibits the power of concentrating the imagination upon the subject, to the exclusion of an extraneous and discordant train of thought, and at the same time furnishes an admirable instance of dramatic cape, is Mariana. landscape painting, or passion reflecting itself on landAs the physiologists tell us that the organs of the higher animals are found in an undeveloped state in those of lower type, we may look upon this poem as a foreshadowing of a kind of poetry that, in the later volumes, will be found in full perfection. In Mariana, the landscape details are presented with the minute distinctness with which they would strike upon the morbid sensibility of a woman abandoned to lonely misery, whose attention is distracted by no cares, pleasures, or satisfied affections. To the painter in search of the picturesque, or a happy observer, seeing the sunny side of everything, or a utilitarian looking for the productive resources of the scene, the whole aspect of the fen-scenery would be totally different. But selected, grouped, and qualified by epithets, as the natural objects of the landscape are in the poem, they tell of the years of pain and weariness associated with them in the mind of the wretched Mariana, and produce an intense impression of hopeless suffering, which no other treatment of the single figure could have produced. The minute. enumeration of detail would be a fault in a mere landscape-artist, whose object was to describe a natural It is an excellence here, because no other means could so forcibly mark the isolation, the morbid scene. sensitiveness, and the mind vacant of all but misery; because, used thus, it becomes eminently dramatic,— the landscape expresses the passion of the mind which contemplates it, and the passion gives unity and moral interest to the landscape. There is not, throughout the poem, a single epithet which belongs to the objects irrespective of the story with which the scene is associated, or a single detail introduced which does not aid the general impression of the poem. They mark either the pain with which Mariana looks at things, or the long neglect to which she has been abandoned, or some peculiarity of time and place which marks the morbid minuteness of her attention to objects. If the moss is blackened, the flower-pots thickly crusted, the nails rusted, the sheds broken, the latch clinking, the thatch weeded and worn, not one of these epithets but tells of long neglect, and prolongs the key-note of sad and strange loneliness. If She could not look on the sweet heaven, this epithet, startling at first from its apparent intrusion of the frame of mind in which the heaven is sweet, heightens the impression of that tear-blinded misery to which the light in its softest mildness is intolerable. Even at night, when the sky is enveloped in 'thickest dark,' when the flats are 'glooming,' she can only glance across the casement window. Her sleep is broken by sounds that painfully recal the desolate scene of daylight; her dreams are forlorn, and stamped with the hopeless monotony of her lot t; and she wakes to shudder in a cold, windy, cheerless morn. The moat that surrounds her prison is no bright sparkling stream; clustered marsh mosses creep over its blackened and sleeping waters, stifling with their loathsome death in life the most active and joyous of nature's visible powers, and giving to the captive a striking emblem of her own choked and stagnant existence. The poplar hard by is never in repose, shaking like a sick man in a fever; for leagues round spreads the 'level waste, the rounding grey,' with no object, no variety, to interest the attention. What moves, moves always, harassing the nerves,-what is at rest seems dead, striking cold the heart. It is needless to pursue this analysis throughout a poem so familiar. The effect is felt by the reader with hardly a consciousness of the skill of the writer, or of the intense dramatic concentration implied in such employment of language. If expression were the highest aim of poetry, Mariana in the Moated Grange must be counted among the most perfect of poems, in spite of an occasional weakness of phrase. But almost perfect as the execution is, the subject is presented too purely as a picture of hopeless, unrelieved suffering, to deserve the name of a great poem. The suffering is, so to speak, distinct and individual, but the woman who suffers is vague and indistinct; we have no interest in her, because we know nothing about her story or herself in detail; she is not a wronged and deserted woman, but an abstract generalization of wronged and deserted womanhood; all the individuality is bestowed upon the landscape in which she is placed. This again, as was said of Claribel, is to view human life from its least affecting and impressive side. The task that lies before us will not allow us to dwell longer on the poems of the first volume. Taken as a whole, they indicate that Mr. Tennyson set out with the determination to be no copyist, and to abstain from setting to verse the mere personal emotions of his own actual life. Even the few poems that did express personal emotion he has excluded from his collected edition. To hold converse with all forms to present not feelings, but the objects which excite feelings, must have been very distinctly his aim at this period. And it is worth noticing, that though he lived at this time in the centre of the most distin |