Poems. By Alfred Tennyson. Two Volumes. Boston: W. D. Ticknor.

Tennyson is more simply the songster than any poet of our time. With him the delight of musical expression is first, the thought second. It was well observed by one of our companions, that he has described just what we should suppose to be his method of composition in this verse from “The Miller’s Daughter.”

“A love-song I had somewhere read,

An echo from a measured strain,

Beat time to nothing in my head

From some odd corner of the brain.

It haunted me the morning long,

With weary sameness in the rhymes,

The phantom of a silent song,

That went and came a thousand times.”

So large a proportion of even the good poetry of our time is ever over-ethical or over-passionate, and the stock poetry is so deeply tainted with a sentimental egotism, that this, whose chief merits lay in its melody and picturesque power, was most refreshing. What a relief, after sermonizing and wailing had dulled the sense with such a weight of cold abstraction, to be soothed by this ivory lute!

Not that he wanted nobleness and individuality in his thoughts, or a due sense of the poet’s vocation; but he won us to truths, not forced them upon us; as we listened, the cope

“Of the self-attained futurity

Was cloven with the million stars which tremble

O’er the deep mind of dauntless infamy.”

And he seemed worthy thus to address his friend,

“Weak truth a-leaning on her crutch,

Wan, wasted truth in her utmost need,

Thy kingly intellect shall feed,

Until she be an athlete bold.”

Unless thus sustained, the luxurious sweetness of his verse must have wearied. Yet it was not of aim or meaning we thought most, but of his exquisite sense for sounds and melodies, as marked by himself in the description of Cleopatra.

“Her warbling voice, a lyre of widest range,

Touched by all passion, did fall down and glance

From tone to tone, and glided through all change

Of liveliest utterance.”

Or in the fine passage in the Vision of Sin, where

“Then the music touched the gates and died;
Rose again from where it seemed to fail,
Stormed in orbs of song, a growing gale;” &c.

Or where the Talking Oak composes its serenade for the pretty Alice; but indeed his descriptions of melody are almost as abundant as his melodies, though the central music of the poet’s mind is, he says, as that of the

“fountain

Like sheet lightning,

Ever brightening

With a low melodious thunder;

All day and all night it is ever drawn

From the brain of the purple mountain

Which stands in the distance yonder:

It springs on a level of bowery lawn,

And the mountain draws it from heaven above,

And it sings a song of undying love.”

Next to his music, his delicate, various, gorgeous music, stands his power of picturesque representation. And his, unlike those of most poets, are eye-pictures, not mind-pictures. And yet there is no hard or tame fidelity, but a simplicity and ease at representation (which is quite another thing from reproduction) rarely to be paralleled. How, in the Palace of Art, for instance, they are unrolled slowly and gracefully, as if painted one after another on the same canvass. The touch is calm and masterly, though the result is looked at with a sweet, self-pleasing eye. Who can forget such as this, and of such there are many, painted with as few strokes and with as complete a success?

“A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand;

Left on the shore; that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land

The............