TENNYSON AS A WORD-PAINTER.

Philip Hamerton, in his Thoughts about Art, has written well upon the advantages and limitations of word-painting compared with colour-painting. He places the best modern word-painters in verse in the following order of excellence : Tennyson, Shelley, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Keats. Tennyson he places first, and he quotes Ruskin as saying that no description of his is worth four lines of Tennyson. He shows that word description is infinitely limited in its power over form and colour as compared with the pictorial art, and he thinks that Tennyson understands these limits better than any other modern poet, and therefore never becomes tedious by straining after fidelities unattainable by verbal art. That is no doubt true, but the poet is compensated for these limitations by the superior power he possesses of expressing sound and motion. Many passages occur in The Princess, in which both kinds of descriptive power are shown; for instance

All about his motion clung

The shadow of his sister, as the beam

Of the east, that play'd upon them, made them glance
Like those three stars of the airy giant's zone,
That glitter burnished by the frosty dark;

And as the fiery Sirius alters hue,

And bickers into red and emerald, shone

Their morions, washed with morning as they came.

Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves

Of tempest, when the crimson rolling eye
Glares ruin, and the wild birds on the light

Dash themselves dead.

And spill

Their thousand wreaths of dangling water smoke,
That like a broken purpose waste in air.

And then to bed, where half in doze I seemed
To float about a glimmering night, and watch
A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight, swell
On some dark shore just seen that it was rich.

Reels as the golden autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning leaves.

Morn in the white wake of the morning star
Came furrowing all the Orient into gold.

Compare the sunset—

Till the Sun

Grew broader toward his death, and fell, and all
The rosy heights came out above the lawns,
And she, as one that climbs a peak to gaze
O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night,
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore,
And suck the blinding splendour from the sand,
And quenching lake by lake, and tarn by tarn,
Expunge the world!

The poem contains many such pictorial descriptions, which, if excelled by painting in preciseness of colour, are full of movement unattainable upon canvas. It is impossible to resist giving a few more descriptive passages.

Sees the midsummer midnight, Norway sun

Set into sunrise.

Woman's love unworthily bestowed is vividly described

Their sinless faith

A maiden moon that sparkles on a sty,

Glorifying clown and satyr.

The three friends early on the first morning in the college

High

Above the empurpled champaign, drank the gale
That, blown about the foliage underneath,

And sated with the innumerable rose,
Beat balm upon our eyelids.

THE POET AS INTERPRETER OF THE AGE.

The following extract from F. W. Robertson is perhaps the most justly appreciative criticism of Tennyson which has ever appeared. It is from a lecture upon English poetry, delivered to the working-men of Brighton in 1852:

"I ranked Tennyson in the first order, because with great mastery over his material-words, great plastic power of versification and a rare gift of harmony, he has also vision or insight; and because feeling intensely the great questions of the day, not as a mere man of letters, but as a man, he is to some extent the interpreter of his age, not only in its mysticism, which I tried to show you is the necessary reaction from the rigid formulas of science and the earthliness of an age of work, into the vagueness which belongs to infinitude, but also in his poetic and almost prophetic solution of some of its great questions.

"Thus in his Princess, which he calls a 'medley,' the former half of which is sportive, and the plot almost too fantastic and impossible for criticism, while the latter portion seems too serious for a story so light and flimsy, he has with exquisite taste disposed of the question which has its burlesque and comic as well as its tragic side, of woman's present place and future destinies. And if any one wishes to see this subject treated with a masterly and delicate hand, in protest alike against the theories which would make her as the man, which she could only be by becoming masculine, not manly, and those which would have her to remain the toy, or the slave, or the slight thing of sentimental and frivolous accomplishment which education has hitherto aimed

at making her, I would recommend him to study the few last pages of The Princess, where the poet brings the question back, as a poet should, to nature; develops the ideal out of the actual woman, and reads out of what she is, on the one hand, what her Creator intended her to be, and on the other, what she never can or ought to be."-Rev. F. W. Robertson, Lectures and Addresses.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF "THE PRINCESS."

It seems appropriate to close this study with a list of the various editions of the poem, and the present prices in the London booksellers' shops.

First Edition, pp. 164; published 1847.

Priced in original cloth binding, £1, 15s.

Second Edition, pp. 164; published 1848.

The dedication to Henry Lushington was added to this edition, and a few verbal changes made. Priced cloth, uncut, 163.

Third Edition, pp. 177; published 1850.

This edition was thoroughly revised. Large additions were made in the body of the poem. The songs and the interlude were added, and the poet's thought fully expressed. Priced in original cloth, 7s. 6d.

Fourth Edition, pp. 182; published 1851.

In this, all the passages about the weird seizures of the Prince were inserted. The fourth song was altered to what it now is. The second stanza of the first song was omitted, but restored in subsequent editions. Priced 78. 6d.

Fifth Edition, pp. 183; published 1853.

In this, the passage in the Prologue commencing "O
miracle of woman," and ending-" So sang the
gallant glorious chronicle," was first inserted.
this edition the text was settled as we now have it.

In

In America The Princess was published by Ticknor & Fields, of Boston, in 1848. It was reprinted from the first edition of 1847. In 1855 the same publishers issued a collected edition of Tennyson's works, containing this poem reprinted from the fifth edition. At the present time the first edition can be bought in Boston for 3s. sterling.

THE END.