the Pythoness, or irrepressible weeping shakes the breast of the child. Tennyson is the wizard, looking, with unmoved face, into the furnace, whose white heat melts the flint; Mrs. Browning has the furnace in her own bosom, and you see its throbbings. Tennyson's imagination treads loftily on cloth of gold, its dainty foot neither wetted with dew nor stained with mire; Mrs. Browning's rushes upward and onward, its drapery now streaming in the wind, now draggled in the mountain rivers, making, with impetuous lawlessness, for the goal. Mrs. Browning has scarcely a poem undefaced by palpable error or extravagance; Tennyson's poetry is characterized by that perilous absence of fault which seems hardly consistent with supreme genius. Between our greatest living poet, therefore, and the greatest of all poetesses there can be instituted no general comparison.

BOOKS OF REFERENCE.

elists," pp. 59–109.

Essays: By E. C. Stedman (Scribner, | G. Barnett Smith's "Poets and Novvol. vii.), Edgar A. Poe, E. P. Whipple, and Gilfillan. Biographical Essays by A. H. Stoddard.

Kate Field's Letter from Florence (Atlantic Monthly, September, 1861). Letters to R. H. Horne, published 1877.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "French and
Italian Journals."

64

Mary Russell Mitford's Recollec-
tions of a Literary Life."
Bayard Taylor's At Home and

Abroad."

Edinburgh Review, October, 1861. Peter Bayne's "Two Great English- British Quarterly Review, 1865.

women" (1881).

ALFRED TENNYSON

(1809-).

TENNYSON'S PORTRAITS.

THE first published portrait of Tennyson was taken from a painting by Samuel Laurence: numerous other likenesses are now in circulation.

PERSONAL APPEARANCE.

One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough, dusky-dark hair; bright, laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face-most massive yet most delicate; of sallow brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musically metallic-fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe! We shall see what he will grow to.-THOMAS CARLYLE: Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1847).

Tennyson is a grand specimen of a man, with a magnificent head set on his shoulders like the capital of a mighty pillar. His hair is long and wavy and covers a massive head. He wears a beard and mustache, which one begrudges as hiding so much of that firm, powerful, but finely-chiselled mouth. His eyes are large and His eyes are large and gray, and open wide when a subject interests him; they are well shaded by the noble brow, with its strong lines of thought and suffering. I can quite understand Samuel Laurence calling it the best balance of head he had ever seen. He is very brown after all the pedestrianizing along our south Coast. CAROLINE FOX: Diary.

COMMENTS.

Miss Alfred.-LORD LYTTON.

But I admire Alfred, and hope—nay trust-that one day he will prove himself a poet. If he do not--then I am no prophet. -PROF. JOHN WILSON.

I am not sure that Tennyson is not the greatest of poets. The uncertainty attending the public conception of the term "poet" alone prevents me from demonstrating that he is. Other bards produce effects which are, now and then, otherwise produced than by what we call poems - but Tennyson an effect which only a poem does. His alone are idiosyncratic poems.— EDGAR A. POE.

Of the living poets of England Tennyson at this time occupies the highest rank; and he is destined to a wide and high regard. -DR. R. W. Griswold.

Tennyson speaks with rapture of some of the Cornish scenery. At one little place-Looe-where he arrived in the evening, he cried: "Where is the sea? Show me the sea!" So after the sea he went stumbling in the dark, and fell down and hurt his leg so much that he had to be nursed for six weeks by a surgeon there. -CAROLINE FOX.

Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Wordsworth wanted. There is no finer ear, nor more command of the keys of language. Color, like the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pencil in waves so rich that we do not miss the central form. Through all his refinements, too, he has reached the publica certificate of good-sense and general power, since he who aspires to be the English poet must be as large as London-not in the same kind as London but in his own kind. But he wants a subject, and climbs no mount of vision to bring its secrets to the people. He contents himself with describing the Englishman as he is, and proposes no better.-RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1857).

What Shakspere was to the age of Elizabeth as the suggestive poet of a just patriotism, Tennyson is to the age of Victoria.— CHARLES KNIGHT: Popular History of England.

No English poet, with the possible exception of Byron, has so ministered to the natural appetite for poetry in the people as Tennyson. Byron did this-unintentionally, as all genius does