In Enoch Arden, 676, it is used again Or withered holt, or tilth or pasturage. Grange-originally the barn or building in which grain was stored; now applied to any group of farm buildings Line III. And blowing bosks of wilderness. Uncultivated thickets blooming with wild flowers. Milton has "blowing banks." Bosk is an abbreviation of boscage, an old French word (now bois). This latter word is a favourite with Tennyson, e.g., Dream of Fair Women, 51— Thridding the sombre boscage of the wood. And again, in his last volume, in Sir John Oldcastle- Shakespeare's Tempest, iv. I, has My bosky acres and my unshrubbed down. A passage precisely parallel occurs in Boadicca— Fear not, isle of blowing woodland, isle of silvery parapets! Line 115. But bland the smile that, like a wrink ling wind On glassy water, drove his cheek in lines. These lines are not in the first or second editions. The third edition reads But bland the smile that puckered up his checks. Mr. Wace quotes the following parallel passage from Shelley-Prince Athanase, part ii. Line 135. O'er the vision wan Of Athanase, a ruffling atmosphere Knowledge, so my daughter held, Was all in all. Some This is the central point of the Princess' delusion. have thought that Tennyson borrowed the idea of his Poem from Johnson's Rassels. It is a long way from Rasselas to The Princess. The following is the only passage upon which this theory is based-a very slender support: "The princess thought, that of all sublunary things, knowledge was the best: she desired, first, to learn all sciences, and then proposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside, that, by conversing with the old, and educating the young, she might divide her time between the acquisition and communication of wisdom, and raise up for the next age models of prudence and patterns of piety."—Rasselas. Others suppose that the idea was suggested by Loce's Labour's Lost, i. 1— Our court shall be a little Academe, Still and contemplative in living art. This is far more probable, because the plot of that play turns on the attempted seclusion of a king and his attendants for three years in study, during which time no woman was to approach the court. The disturbing influence of love upon such a plan is the motive of the comedy. This theory is perhaps hinted at in the lines in the Prologue We should have him back Who told the Winter's Tale to do it for us. Line 204. Him we gave a costly bribe To guerdon silence. Rare as a transitive verb, but so used by Chaucer, e.g., Court of Love, iv. 30— And by Shakespeare, 2 Hen. VI., i. 4— See you well guerdoned for these good deserts. And again by Tennyson in Love thou thy land It grows to guerdon afterdays. This word guerdon has a curious history. It originated in the old High German widarlôn, "recompense," and was corrupted, by the aid of the Latin donum, into Low Latin widerdonum, a half Latin, half Teutonic compound. By the usual change of w into gui this was changed into the Romance verb guidardonare. Thence the Italian noun guiderdone, French guerdon, from whence Chaucer took it and made it English. Vide Diez, Romance Dictionary; Skeat, Historical Dictionary. Line 220. And all about us pealed the nightingale It is only the male bird which sings. The functions of the sexes are strictly defined in the land of singing birds. But the poets, all of them, keep the old Greek myth in mind, and while scientifically wrong, are poetically and historically correct, for Philomela was a princess who was turned into a nightingale which sang. Even Isaac Walton uses the pronoun "her." Milton, in Il Pensersoso, writes "Sweet chauntress," thinking evidently of poor Philomela. Chaucer in the Cuckow and the Nightingale uses always the feminine gender I thanked her, and was ryght wel apayed; Line 229. Into rooms which gave Upon a pillared porch. So also in the Gardener's Daughter This, yielding, gave into a grassy walk. And in Gareth and Lynette— Now two great entries opened from the hall; At one end one, that gave upon a range Of level pavement. The use of gave in this manner is a Gallicism adopted from an idiomatic use of the word donner. Line 243. The seal was Cupid bent above a scroll, his eyes. The allusion here is to a passage in Plato's Symposium : “And am I not right in asserting that there are two god-. desses? The elder one having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite-she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione-her we call Common; and the Love, who is her fellow-worker, may and must also have the name of common, as the other love is called heavenly."-Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, vol. ii. CANTO II. Line 8. Thro' the porch that sang All round with laurel. Laurel-the tree of the god of the lyre. A fragrant tree with abundance of fragrant blossoms, the favourite resort of This porch is suggestive of a passage in birds and bees. Ariosto, vi. 21— Small thickets with the scented laurel gay, Pleached in mixed modes, all lovely form a bower, Line 14. Enringed a billowing fountain. The prefix en was much used by Shakespeare and the older writers where it is now abandoned. Generally it was employed as here, in its proper sense of surrounding, but sometimes to add force or intensity to a word as the "enridged sea," the " enchafed flood." In the Midsummer Night's Dream, iv. I, we find The female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. In Henry V., Prologue to Act iv., a similar word is usedHow dread an army hath enrounded him. Line 28. Not without redound, Of use and glory to yourselves ye come. The use of redound as a substantive is very rare. It does not occur in Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, or elsewhere in Tennyson. It is a sonorous word for the end of a line, and there is no reason why it should not be adopted or retained, as rebound and many other similar words. Line 38. He worships your ideal. A very peculiar sense is given to the word ideal here, and one not found elsewhere. The ideal of the Princess, that is her conception of the highest perfection, is not what the |