Where Claribel low-lieth."
This little poem derives its charm, much easier to feel than to describe, from the instinctive selection of the most exquisitely beautiful imagery, and the most felicitous phraseology. Nature, with her loveliest attributes, is made to express the regrets of affection.
But the progress of mind and purpose is very conspicuous in the poems of Tennyson. The first volume of his present edition is rich to excess with all the charms of genius; but it can bear no comparison with the elevated character and human object of many poems in the second volume. In the earlier stages of his career, the gay poet rather luxuriates in the wealth of sentiment than the golden ore of virtue, which he finds stored up by all-bountiful nature, for the use of his genius. He chants many merry ditties, full of elastic grace, like that to Airy, Fairy Lilien. He draws female characters glorious as divinities, affluent in charms, warm with love, the Isabels, and Eleanors, and Madelines of the volume. He works out another class of lyrical poems, such as Mariana in the Moated Grange, The Miller's Daughter, The Lady of Shalott, all most inimitable of their kind, where every word is, as it were, a jewel of poetry too precious ever to be lost again. Where the landscape is painted with the pencil of a great master—a Claude or a Poussin of poetry—where we see the golden cornfield, the evening sun gleaming on the old towers of enchanted beauty, where the birds sing, and the river runs as in a glorified dream; where every knight in his burnished greaves, or lady in her tapestried chamber, is presented as in the glass of Agrippa, living, moving, yet alone in the charmed scene of an unapproachable life! Where every minute falls numbered and weighed from the hand of time, and a great sentiment of weary existence and waiting is gradually let down upon you with the pressure of a nightmare. Or again, where the scenery and loves of rural life are, as in the Miller's Daughter, sketched with the pleasing and buoyant heart of Nature herself, and we are made to feel what brooks of love and happiness, bankful, flow through many a lowly place. Beyond these advance the passionate sorrow of Oriana, the drowsy richness of the Lotus Eaters, the splendid painting of The Palace of Art, and the Dream of Fair Woman; but not one of these is to be compared for a moment to Locksley Hall, or the Two Voices, in breadth of human sympathy, in a development of the great spirit of progress, in a union of all that those earlier poems possess of vigorous and beautiful with that sense of duty which comes on the true heart with advancing years, toward the world of actual man. In the first volume there are indications that the poet, calm as he is, and apart as he seems from the crowded path of human life, is still one of the true spirits who live for and feel with all. The poem of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, is a stern lesson to the heartlessness of aristocratic pride, shrouded as it may be under the fairest of forms.
"Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
Of me you shall not win renown;
You thought to break a country heart
For pastime, ere you went to town
At me you smiled, but unbeguiled
I saw the snare, and I retired:
The daughter of a hundred lords,