BOOKS.

TENNYSON'S NEW POEMS.* IN writing last week on the most notable of these poems,— the sequel to " Locksley Hall,"—we said enough to show how fine a poem Tennyson has given us in his old age,—

one very different, indeed, as it ought, of course, to have been, from the poem written in youth in a similar mood, as different as the melancholy suggested by the grief of another is from the melancholy which springs directly from your own grief ; but though different in kind, it is certainly not less worthy of its author. The other three poems which this volume contains are the highly hypothetical and ineffectual one on "The Fleet," of which it would be unbecoming to speak as we think ; the happy and sonorous one on "The Queen's Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition," of which we will only say that it has in it a majestic rhetoric that will do much to strengthen that sense of brotherhood between this Kingdom and its Colonies and Dependencies to which it gives so powerful an expression,—and, finally, the drama on "The Promise of May."

Of the last poem, though dramatically it did not succeed, and was not, we think, one that was likely to succeed on the stage, it would be impossible not to speak with respect as a poem. Its great fault is, as we ventured to point out at the time, that the poem was not one bringing vividly home to the heart the signi- ficance and meaning of a true blight on "the promise of May,"

but one tracing out, for a partly didactic purpose, the source of that blight in selfish and sceptical atheism. Tennyson has not

given us in this drama one powerful delineation of the curse which selfishness and treachery bring on the promise which they blight. The whole force of the poet is spent on the study of the seducer's moral atheism, and of the utter deadness of conscience to which it leads. Explanations of the root of evil cannot be dramatic. It is the fruit, not the root of evil, which can be made dramatic, and Tennyson spends comparatively little of his genius on the fruit, and much upon the germs. There is something contrary to Nature, too, in a villain's coming back to the scene of his villainy with a feebly lurking sense of self-reproach, to fall in love with the sister of her whom he had ruined. If that sense of self-reproach were real at all, it would have excited in him the strongest repulsion for the associations so powerfully recalling to him his own villainy ; if they were not real at all, he would hardly have felt any disposition to return to a scene where he knew that he might be recognised and disgraced. The idea of his proposing to himself to make up by his love for one sister for his treachery to the other, is a thoroughly artificial one, which suggests a most unnatural compound of the tenderness of a grate- ful memory with the shamelessness of a hard heart. But though we do not wonder at the ill-success of "The Promise of May" on the stage, for it seems to us to paint most carefully what touches least the homely feelings of man, and to spend more care on the various backgrounds and incidents of the scene than it spends on the scene itself, it contains many very beautiful touches of descriptive poetry, strokes of true humour, and several lyrics of delicate and highly finished beauty. The passage in which the villain of the piece meditates on the evil qualities he had inherited from his own ancestors, and is inter- rupted in that fine soliloquy by the burden of the rustic harvest- home song which the labourers are singing, is in all respects.

worthy of Tennyson's fine and elaborate genius :—

" HARotn.

Poor Eva! 0 my God, if man be only

A willy-nilly current of sensations—

Reaction needs mast follow revel—yet- Why feel remorse, he, knowing that he must have- Moved in the iron grooves of Destiny ?

Remorse then is a part of Destiny,

• Leekl,ley Halt Shay Years After, &s. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson. London : Macmillan and Co.

Nature a liar, making us feel guilty Of her own faults. My grandfather—of him They say, that women- 0 this mortal house, Which we are born into, is haunted by 'The ghosts of the dead passions of dead men ; And these take flesh again with oar own flesh, And bring us to confusion. He was only A poor philosopher who call'd the mind

Of children a blank page, a tabula rasa.

There, there, is written in invisible inks

4 Lust, Prodigality, Covetousness, Craft,

Cowardice, Murder '—and the heat and fire Of life will bring them out, and black enough, So the child grow to manhood : better death

With our first wail than life—

Song (further off).

Till the end o' the daay An' the last load ham, Load ham.'"

"There we have indeed a "harvest home" of which only the -thinker and the poet can find the visible traces. For the world in general, as we are truly told, the writing is in " invisible ink." And the rustic song which follows,—the song of the half-drunken carter who drives so carelessly down the hollow lane that he drives down one of the heroines of the play, is as full of Ten- nyson's humorous insight into the moods of the labourers, as his "Northern Farmer" is of his humorous insight into the

moods of the wealthier boors

Gee oop ! whoa! Gee oop ! whoa Scizzars an' Pampy was good tins to goa Thruf slush an' squad When roads was bad, But hallos ud stop at the Vine•an'-the-Hop, Fur boath on 'em knaw'd as well as mysen That beer be as good fur 'erses as men.

Gee oop ! whoa! Gee oop ! whoa! Scizzars an' Pumpy was good am to goit."

And, again, where has Tennyson's lyric genius touched a higher point than in the following tiny but exquisite song ? Doubt- less in "Break, break, break !" and "Tears, idle tears ;" but is -there any other song of his that surpasses the following P-

" 0 happy lark, that warbled high Above thy lowly nest,

0 brook, that brawleat merrily by Thro' fields that once were bleat, 0 tower spiring to the sky, 0 graves in daisies drest, 0 Love and Life, how weary am I, And how I long for rest.'"

'To sum up, Eva's tragic fate is not so told as to touch our -hearts deeply. Dora's stronger womanliness leaves us quite unmoved. The blind old father's troubles concern us little. We look on at the unrolling of the little plot with a sense of wonder that Tennyson should have found an interest in one so little natural and so inadequately worked out ; and yet in the side-touches from beginning to end the great poet is visible, and in the flowers which spring up beside the way we find our recompense for the dramatic disappointment which he has pre- pared for us. None the less, the one poem in this volume which -will add to his reputation is the sequel to " Locksley Hall."