And o'er his head the holy vessel hung
Redder than any rose, a joy to me,

For now I knew the veil had been withdrawn.
Then in a moment when they blazed again
Opening, I saw the host of little stars

Down on the waste, and straight beyond the star

I saw the spiritual city and all her spires

And gateways in a glory like one pearl,

No larger, tho' the goal of all the saints,

Strike from the sea; and from the star there shot

A rose-red sparkle to the city, and there

Dwelt, and I knew it was the Holy Grail,
Which never eyes on earth again shall see."

It is evident that in this quest of the Holy Grail, Tennyson intends to symbolize the conduct of those who forsake the tasks that lie in their path, the necessary labors of life and society, to pursue a distant and lofty good, a virtue and excellence beyond the reach of common men. All who seek salvation for themselves or for the world by turning aside from the honest, faithful discharge of immediate and clearly indicated duties, may lay to heart the teachings of this poem. These teachings are best seen in the closing words of King Arthur:

"And spake I not too truly, O my knights?

Was I too dark a prophet, when I said

To those who went upon the Holy Quest

That most of them would follow wandering fires,
Lost in the quagmire,-lost to me and gone,

And left me gazing at a barren board,

And a lean order-scarce return'd a tithe

And out of those to whom the vision came

My greatest hardly will believe he saw;

Another hath beheld it afar off,

And leaving human wrongs to right themselves,
Cares but to pass into the silent life.

And one hath had the vision face to face,
And now his chair desires him here in vain,
However they may crown him otherwhere.
And some among you hold that if the king
Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow:

Not easily, seeing that the king must guard
That which he rules, and is but as the hind
To whom a space of land is given to plough,
Who may not wander from the allotted field
Before his work be done; but, being done,
Let visions of the night or of the day
Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,

This light that strikes his eye-ball is not light,
This air that smites his forehead is not air

But vision."

There has been of late a good deal of discussion as to whether Tennyson is really a great poet. A critic in the (London) Quarterly Review has undertaken to reduce the poet to his true dimensions. He finds him not to be a master in science and philosophy, and says that when he touches on social and political questions, he does it with much candor but little success. It can hardly be expected, even of great poets, that they should be preeminent in these departments. But if it be the poet's duty to "watch what main currents draw the age" (the language is Tennyson's), we think that few have discharged it more faithfully and truly. The tendencies of advanced thought and the movements of society in the present age are, it seems to us, reflected with extraordinary vividness and force in some of his poems, particularly in his marvellous "In Memoriam." That he does not stand aloof from the social progress of the time is abundantly shown by "The Princess:" twenty-five years ago, when as yet the woman question was scarcely heard of, he felt its coming power and importance. But the critic to whom we refer has a heavier charge to bring. Tennyson, he tells us, is wanting in dramatic power. How many of England's great poets are not liable to the same imputation? Not Spenser, certainly, nor Milton (though some of his works are dramatic in form), nor Byron, nor Wordsworth. There are many who regard Browning as a dramatic genius; but the introspective monologues in which his persons go through a kind of self-dissection, an elaborate analysis of their feelings and motives, are very different from those truly dramatic works where the persons manifest their characters unconsciously in words and actions. That Tennyson does not regard himself as gifted with this faculty may be presumed from the fact that, while he has tried his powers in many directions, he has abstained wholly from dramatic composition. But one who had not a profound insight

into the human heart could never have written "In Memoriam.' We find in that poem many passages where evanescent or rudimentary feelings are represented with a matchless subtlety of apprehension and expression. As we read it, we learn to know ourselves; we recognize states of mind that have belonged to our own past experience, but were so obscure, shadowy, undeveloped, that we were never properly conscious of their existence.

There is a place, doubtless, for negative criticism. It is proper to point out the deficiencies even of the greatest minds. But it is more gracious, more instructive, more useful, to criticise them from the positive side, to acknowledge and appreciate what is valuable in their works. What have they given to the world? What elements of truth and beauty, what sources of enjoyment or incitement, have they added to the common stock? Let the critic look at Tennyson in this way, duly considering the variety of his works both in substance and in form, considering their finish of workmanship, their perfection of rhythm, their condensed fullness of meaning, their moral elevation and purity; and, if he thinks as we do, he will conclude that, with the exception of Shakespeare, no English poet has been on the whole more richly endowed, or has left a more precious legacy to after times. Many, we know, will regard this as a most exaggerated estimate. We cannot here debate the point, even if any debate could be expected to give a result which all would accept. We will content ourselves with giving one more extract, taken from "The Passing of Arthur;" and if any one, having read it attentively, thinks that any but a great poet could have written it, we shall be willing to differ from him in opinion.

"Then rose the king and moved his host by night,
And ever push'd Sir Modred, league by league,
Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse,

A land of old upheaven from the abyss

By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,
And the long mountain ended in a coast

Of ever-shifting sand, and far away
The phantom circle of a moaning sea.
There the pursuer could pursue no more,
And he that fled no further fly the king;

And then, that day, when the great light of heaven

Burn'd at his lowest in the rolling year,

On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed.

Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight
Like this last, dim, weird battle of the West.
A death-white mist slept over sand and sea:
Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew
Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold
With formless fear, and ev'n on Arthur fell
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought,
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,

And friend slew friend, not knowing whom he slew;

And some had visions out of golden youth,

And some beheld the faces of old ghosts

Look in upon the battle; and in the mist
Was many a noble deed, many a base."

THE EARTHLY PARADISE-PART III.*-Here is Mr. Morris's second volume, with only half the number of stories that the first contained. He promises another to complete the full set of two for each month in the year. What a marvel of productive power he is! Can any other poet be named who would undertake such a task and perform it so successfully? The very promise to versify these ancient tales, and to supply a fixed number of them without losing his hold on the interest of his readers, has some hardihood in it. Would Scott have ventured to predict the number of the Waverley novels, or Tennyson that of the Idylls of the King? Not less to be admired than this confidence is the success which justifies it. Readers of poetry know what the first volume was, and we can safely assure them that they need not fear disappointment in going on to the second. The skill in selection, the variety of treatment, the simple, steady progress of narrative, the delicate, sympathetic reproduction of ancient stories, the purity and power of feeling-all are here as they were there. But in this second instalment the proportion of classic to Norse stories is changed. Only 88 pages out of 382, if we may be pardoned for having counted, are given to the Greek myths, and they seem to us less valuable than the others. Yet the first one of all, the Death of Paris, we could not spare, and the third one, the story of Rhodope, unclassical as it is in its tone, carries the reader on with singular fascination and will linger long in his memory. If any one will look at the original story in a few lines of Strabo copied by Elian, he will see on how slight a hint Mr. Morris has built up this striking poem. It suggests the story of Cinderella by the main feature of its plot,

The Earthly Paradise. A Poem. By WILLIAM MORRIS, author of "The Life and Death of Jason." Part III. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1870.

yet how unlike is the strange character it develops. A woman of perfect beauty in a lowly home, living her daily life in a cold, mechanical way, inspiring love in many hearts yet returning it not at all except in scant measure to her old father, a puzzle to others and to herself, and all because she has a mysterious consciousness that she is destined for a higher life-is it not a strange conception? It seems almost an allegory of the conflict between love and ambition. To us the most perfect work of art in all the book is the description of the killing of Paris in the first two pages. The picture of the Greek and Trojan armies, tired of the war and only keeping it alive by skirmishing, the gloomy discouragement of the Greeks, the awkward coming out of Philoktetes, the aimlessness of his shooting, the contrast between him and the dainty warrior whom he slays in the very feathers of their arrows, the weather itself in sympathy with the deed,-such things make the narrative wonderfully vivid and impressive. It strikes us as Homeric; there can be no higher praise.

A

When we turn to the Norse stories in this volume, we find ourselves in a very different world. The first and second have the same character that marked most of those in the first volume. sort of magic rules in them, quite different from the supernatural action of the gods in Greek myths. In both appears the dream of a union of man with beings of another race, that wide-spread idea which shows the power of our desire to penetrate the mystery of the invisible world about us. In both too we find in different forms the deep feeling of unsatisfied longing which breathes in all modern literature. In each a man is put on probation, to show whether he can deny himself present gratification; he fails, and loses all his happiness. He fails because he has not

"The calm, wise heart that knoweth how to rest,
The hears too kind to snatch out at the best,

Since it is part of all, each thing a part
Beloved alike of that wide-loving heart."

And what is the "land east of the sun?"

Is it not the land

to which at first John was taken by his love? Is it not the unattainable land of our dreams, the "Earthly Paradise" itself? The last story in the book is the one which will probably most interest the majority of Mr. Morris's readers, because it is the most real and human. It is a story of Iceland life at the time of the introduction there of Christianity. There is no magic in it. It is a plain story of human love and hate, with the wildness of the race and