clothes in its forms a sentimental nature-philosophy, pantheistical worship. Enone is more akin in spirit to Endymion and Hyperion; but its verse is more majestic, and its luxuriant pictorial richness more controlled by definite conception, more articulated by fine drawing, than even the latter and greater of Keats's two poems. Gorgeous mountain and figure painting stand here as the predominant aim as clearly as in any picture by Titian or Turner; only poetry will not lose her prerogative of speech, and will paint her mountains and her figures in a medium of passion to which the artist upon canvas vainly aspires. Round Ida and its valleys, round Troas and its windy citadel, Enone can pour the enchantment of her memories of love and grief. To her can the naked goddesses-painted as Rubens could not paint them,-life, motion, and floating lights-utter celestial music, and grand thoughts ally themselves with splendid pictures. If the wish will force its way, that Greek mythology might be left at peace in its tomb, and that a harp so strung to passion and to thought should pour the spell of its music upon a theme in which the imagination should harmonize and interpret the life of the men and women about us, we can but answer, that the deeper music will yet beat itself out,-that this is but pre

lude, showing the artist's power and perfecting his hand.

The Lotos Eaters carries Tennyson's tendency to pure æstheticism to an extreme point. It is picture and music, and nothing more. The writer did not suppose he was writing Hamlet, or solving "the riddle of the painful earth." Nor must we go to the work with that demand upon it. If music and picture-the feelings of imaginary beings, in a pure region of imagination, perfectly presented in rhythmical language that takes the formative impulse of the feeling, as falling water does of the forces that draw it into a flashing curve-have no charm for any mind, that mind can find no interest in The Lotos Eaters. To attempt to treat it as an allegory, which figures forth the tendency to abandon the battle of life, to retire from a fruitless, ever-renewed struggle,―to read it as we should read The Pilgrim's Progress, and look out for facts of actual experience which answer to its images, is as monstrous and perverse as it would be to test a proposition of geometry by its rhythm and imagery. A mood of feeling, of course, it represents, and feeling dependent on, and directed to distinct objects,-in this latter respect, alone, differing from music. We may, of course, too, apply the mood of feeling thus de

picted to the real events of life, and translate it into the actual language of men under the influence of 'mild-eyed melancholy.' So we might with a sonata of Beethoven's, but the application is ours, and not the composer's; and if we attempt to limit the composer to our interpretation, rather than give ourselves up to his free inspiration from a purely musical impulse, all we get by it is, generally, a very poor verbal poem, instead of a noble work that does not, however, belong to the region of articulate speech. It is, perhaps, because the companion poem of the Hesperides does not even represent a mood of feeling, as well as because it is far less perfect in execution, that it has been left out of succeeding editions.

It may be suggested that The Palace of Art contradicts what has been said of Mr. Tennyson's tendency to paint pictures rather than to dramatize life and its emotions. And had the conception of the poem been adequately worked out, it would have reached the highest point of view from which life can be surveyed. The poet himself declares it to be an allegory, and, therefore, to have an interest mainly ethical, to which, by the nature of the case, all mere pictorial or musical beauty is to be subordinate. But how has the conception been carried out? Has the poet's intention been adequately rea

lized, or has the fully developed pictorial and rhythmical talent been too much for his less highly developed dramatic and philosophic power? No one can read the poem and fail to see that only half his intention has been completed; and that, in spite of himself, the pictorial and musical element has prevailed over the moral and philosophic aim. With the site, construction, and furniture of The Soul's Palace, he must be a fastidious critic who would not be highly delighted,—the finest ideal Strawberry Hill that ever poet's brain conceived. With the truth of the lesson, too, no moralist can quarrel. It is profoundly true that a mere artistic enjoyment of the universe will make no great soul permanently happy. To make the poem perfect, the process of the soul's growing discontent with, and final disgust at, the beautiful objects with which it has surrounded itself, should have been displayed and accounted for, since, as mere statement, it is a truism. If a real man has come to the conclusion that his happiness consists in perfect isolation from his fellowcreatures in act and sympathy, in letting the world and his fellow-men enter his thoughts solely as pictures to be enjoyed for their variety, one of two things happens to him, either that his pictures cease to amuse him when his appetite for novelty is worn

out, or arouse his sympathies for the men and women whose lives and thoughts they shadow forth,-his awe and adoration of the source of all this wondrous activity,―his desire to understand the meaning and purpose of it all. Mere variety, that does not succeed in exciting these feelings, soon wearies; for the infinite element in life is not the variety of things by which we are acted on, but the unfathomable personality of our own being; and it is just this personality which the soul in the poem is doing all he can to quench in himself. He is trying to live by the outward things about him, and by the enjoyment they afford to his intellect; while he ignores that relation to God and to his fellow-beings, in the consciousness and acknowledgment of which spiritual life consists. When, then, his beautiful objects pall upon him, as his intellectual and perceptive craving is wearied, they become dead things, and loathsome in his eyes—a disgust at his life seizes him, while he shrinks in horror from the prospective isolation of death. The soul that has not exercised itself in feelings which grow by what they feed on must experience inconceivable horror at the decay of its intellectual and perceptive activities, unless it contemplates annihilation. But the soul in The Palace has reasoned itself into a conviction of im