knows how to grasp the larger effects of Nature, the mountain-gloom, the cloud-grandeur, the dawn of day or night of tempest, and touch them off with an imaginative skill and power of phrase which stamp them indelibly on the memory. For let him who has watched the pageant of the dying day say if any human art could more grandly fix in words the western cloud effects than this:

Yonder cloud,

That rises upward, always higher,

And topples round the dreary west,

A looming bastion fringed with fire.

Or let him who has studied the warfare of wind and cloud and the wild upheaval and terror of gathering tempest say if this is not a picture such as Turner would have delighted to paint, and only he could have painted in all its stern magnificence :

The forest cracked, the waters curl'd,

The cattle huddled on the lea;

And wildly dashed on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world.

Nor could an angry morning after tempest be better painted than in this one pregnant line:—

All in a fiery dawning, wild with wind.

Nor could the savage splendour of Alpine fastnesses, where precipice and glacier rise tier above tier, in shattered beauty and unvanquishable strength, be better brought home to the imagination than in this touch of solemn imagery :

The monstrous ledges slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke
That like a ruined purpose waste in air.

Nor has the breaking up of a stormy sky, when the clouds suddenly lift as though withdrawn upon invisible pulleys, and there is light at eventide, ever been represented better than in one of the earliest of all these poems, the immature and unequal "Eleanore:"

As thunder-clouds, that hung on high,
Roof'd the world with doubt and fear,
Floating thro' an evening atmosphere,
Grow golden all about the sky.

And for imaginative intensity, such as the great Greek poets would have delighted in, and indeed wholly in their manner, it is hard to excel the phrase in which Tithonus describes the glory of the dawn:—

And the wild team

Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise

And shake the darkness from their loosened manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.

Or the farewell of Ulysses, when he cries:

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.

These are but random samples of the perfection to which Tennyson has wrought his art in the faithful and accurate depiction of Nature. Every word tells: it tells because it is true, because it expresses the very spirit of the scene that he would paint, not less. than its external show. The labour and culture which lie behind such perfect phrases as these are immense. Not infrequently the source of some fine image is to be found in some remote page of the older poets, and part

of the charm of the Tennysonian phrase is that it is often reminiscent-a subtle echo, as it were, of a more ancient music, which does not offend but fascinate. Thus the image of the "ploughed sea" is one of the very oldest since the dawn of language, and the picture of the dawn in "Tithonus" has its counterpart in Marston's noble lines

But see, the dapple-grey coursers of the morn
Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs,
And chase it through the sky.*

But the more enduring element of beauty in such lines is their delightful truthfulness. "The sounding furrows" is an exact representation to ear and eye of what happens when the heaving waters are suddenly smitten with the level sweep of oars. The darkness trampled into flakes of fire is the precise effect of the instantaneous irruption of the splendour of the dawn, when the thin clouds that lie across the east are broken up into floating fragments, and hang quivering, like golden flames, in the lucid air, when the world lies still and windless, waiting for the day. "The fiery dawn," the great burst of streaming yellow, not graduated into crimson or purple, but all vast and lurid, like an angry conflagration in the east, is a spectacle which the seaman knows too well, when the night has been "wild with wind," and the storm pauses at the dawn, only to gather strength for the riotous havoc of the day. It is the exact truth of Nature which is fixed in phrases like these. It is the truth Turner painted, the vision of the miracle of Nature which he strove with infinite toil and true inspiration to retain in his immortal canvases. And because it is

* Vide Lamb's Specimens of Elizabethan Poetry.

Much that might be

said; to much that

true art, therefore it is fine art. said of Nature, Tennyson has not others have said he is indifferent. But this at least he has done he has approached Nature, not with the hot and hasty zeal of the impressionist, but with the cool eye of the consummate artist; and every sketch of Nature which he has given us, whether of the commonplace or the extraordinary, is finished with admirable skill, and has the crowning merit of absolute fidelity, accuracy, and truth,

CHAPTER XX

TENNYSON: LOVE AND WOMAN

UST as one of the most crucial points about a poet is his treatment of Nature, so again, his view of Womanhood affords a key to the character of his mind and the quality of his genius. The love-poetry of the world is one of its most fascinating inheritances, and ranges through many keys. Love has always furnished the impulse to poetry, and has often been its staple. It would be difficult to find any poet who has nothing to say of love; it would be easy to find many poets who have never written exquisitely till they became lovers. The new divine warmth of the heart has liberated the faculties of the intellect, and has given inspiration and insight to the soul. Even when the warmth has been sensuous rather than divine, it has not the less had some effect in the liberation of the mind. Burns displays his highest genius in his lovelyrics. Some of the Elizabethan poets are famous only by a single stanza, or a single poem, which expresses the passion of the human heart with such felicity, such delicate skill, such fire and tenderness, that the world cannot forget their phrases. Rossetti lives in the vision of womanhood, with every sense perpetually tingling to the keen delight of passion. Even Wordsworth kindles at the vision of love: he sees the ideal woman glowing before him, not with any heat of passion indeed, but with a calm and spiritual radiance,