to form the language in which he wrote; still, from the exi gencies of his triple-rhymed metre he seems to have used words in a peculiar sense, a sense never generally adopted. Neither did Milton succeed in bringing all his latinisms into general use. But these writers were great enough to consecrate all their novelties and idiosyncrasies; whereas coined words in poems of less weight and reach give them an air of weakness and eccentricity rather than of originality and strength. The only 'touchstone of desert' in such enterprises as these is 'success.' Mr. Tennyson speaks of a tent as being lamp-lit from the inner.' This is not English, unless he can make it so. His liberties of speech, however, are not so numerous in the present work as in his earlier performances.

A very prevalent fault of style in the present day is one which is sometimes censured under the name of diffuseness, but which may be more properly termed profuseness, and seems to arise, not from rapidity in composing, but from haste in finishing-a foe to real completeness-with the desire to be ever producing an effect, and to hear the shout of applause at every utterance of the Muse, as the mountains re-echo the voice that loudly salutes them. When models of literary excellence were produced in former ages, a writer probably contemplated his work as a whole while he was executing it in detail, and thus kept the detail in order, compressing his matter within a certain sphere to the exclusion or preclusion of much that might be good in itself; whereas now-a-days men pour out sentence after sentence, scene after scene, and think there can be no diffuseness where no idle words are used in the expression of each thought. Poetry, from its nature, is less liable to this defect than prose, and to say that it characterizes the compositions of Mr. Tennyson would be unjust -but they are not free from the fault of nimiety. Can the uninspired critic know better than the inspired poet what suits the spirit of his strain? Sometimes, and to some extent, we think, he can; and for this reason, that he has but to be passive and receive the impression, whereas the poet's task is twofold; he has to feel and to express, and in some cases the active part of his business may interfere with the passive part; especially when he resumes a poetic work after the hour of original inspiration is past.

'

The Princess' could supply us with but too many instances of apparently elaborate exaggeration. Thus - after the lines already quoted in description of the eight daughters of the plough' that stood behind Ida's judgment seat, we read that each of them was

like a spire of land that stands apart,' Cleft from the main, and clang'd about with mews.'

Again-when the Lady Blanche stoops to updrag Melissa:'

She, half on her mother propt,

Half-drooping from her, turn'd her face, and cast

A liquid look on Ida, full of prayer,
Which melted Florian's fancy as she hung,
A Niobean daughter, one arm out,

Appealing to the bolts of Heaven !'—p. 83.

Although the versification of The Princess' is upon the whole agreeable to the ear, yet we regret that it was not rendered smoother and richer throughout. Doubtless it is more difficult to avoid weak and rough lines in a narrative which must comprehend matter not in itself poetic, circumstances and details that are to be succinctly told, than in a composition more limited in its plan; and this may be the sole reason why more of these occur within a given space in The Princess' than in 'none' and 'The Gardener's Daughter;' for in some passages the blank verse of the Medley' is not inferior to any that he has published.

The faults of the poem are soon numbered and ticketed: it is more difficult to do justice to its beauties, for beauty, like happiness, consists of many small parts, and is diffused, is to be felt more than expressed; while defects, like sorrows and misfortunes, are easily defined. We may describe the characteristic merits of The Princess,' however, by saying that it unites abundance of lovely imagery with dramatic power. The actors of the piece are all alive; their characters are well delineated by a few strokes, and their emotions are expressed with energy and animation. The early and concluding portions are the happiest; the former in a sportive, the latter in a more serious vein. We must quote a description of undergraduate relaxation in the gardens of Ida's college :

At last a solemn grace

Concluded, and we sought the gardens: there
One walk'd reciting by herself, and one

In this hand held a volume as to read,

And smoothed a petted peacock down with that:
Some to a low song oar'd a shallop by,

Or under arches of the marble bridge

Hung, shadow'd from the heat: some hid and sought
In the orange thickets: others tost a ball
Above the fountain-jets, and back again
With laughter: others lay about the lawns,
Of the older sort, and murmur'd that their May
Was passing what was learning unto them?

They

They wish'd to marry; they could rule a house;
Men hated learned women and to us came
Melissa, hitting all we saw with shafts
Of gentle satire, kin to charity,

That harm'd not.'-pp. 45, 46.

The account of the tourney-fight is extremely spirited, and the first of two songs sung in the tent, where Ida and her company rest after the excursion, is very beautiful to read, though scarcely fit for a harp accompaniment. It runs thus:

'Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more.'-p. 66.

In narrative and dramatic poems each part depends greatly for its full effect on what goes before and what follows after. Neither the gay variety of the tale in its earlier stages, nor the deeper passion of the later ones, can be appreciated in fragments; and the beauties of this poem approve themselves more on a second perusal, when we read for the sake of the beauties only, and the sense of incongruity is merged in the effect of the whole, than on a first one. It is not without reluctance, therefore, that we detach from the context a part of the description of Psyche's reunion with her child:

Psyche ever stole

A little nearer, till the babe that by us,
Half-lapt in glowing gauze and golden brede,
Lay like a new-fall'n meteor on the grass,
Uncared for, spied its mother and began

A blind

A blind and babbling laughter, and to dance
Its body, and reach its fatling innocent arms
And lazy lingering fingers. She the appeal

Brook'd not, but clamouring out " Mine-mine-not yours,
It is not yours, but mine: give me the child,"
Ceased all on tremble: piteous was the cry.
So stood the unhappy mother open-mouth'd,
And turn'd each face her way: wan was her cheek
With hollow watch, her blooming mantle torn,
Red grief and mother's hunger in her eye,
And down dead-heavy sank her curls, and half
The sacred mother's bosom, panting, burst
The laces toward her babe; but she nor cared
Nor knew it, clamouring on, till Ida heard,
Look'd up, and rising slowly from me, stood
Erect and silent, striking with her glance
The mother, me, the child.'-p. 123.

We conclude with some lines of an Idyll, which the Princess is reading to herself, all in low tones,' beside her lover's couch, when he awakes, 'deep in the night,' after having slept, 'filled thro' and thro' with love, a happy sleep :'

'Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang)
In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?
But cease to move so near the Heavens, and come,
For Love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him

azure pillars of the hearth
Arise to thee; the children call, and I

Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound--
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

And murmuring of innumerable bees.'-p. 151.

ART. V.—1. Estimates for the Effective and Non-Effective Army Services, from 1st of April, 1848, to 31st of March, 1849. 2. Ordnance Estimates for the same Year.

OUR

UR readers will pardon us for declining a minute commentary on some late ministerial and parliamentary proceedings connected with the state of our National Defences. Enough to know that estimates prepared with the utmost solicitude, and offered as the lowest on which the executive could undertake to conduct the business of the country, are subjected

VOL. LXXXII. NO. CLXIV.

2 H

to

to the investigation of a Select Committee-that the attention of the Committee is especially called to the items of expenditure on our military establishments—and that to the House of Commons has been delegated a trust which the Crown, up to February, 1848, had never permitted to pass out of the hands of its confidential servants. What the immediate effect may be, it is hard to say; how the constitution of our monarchy must eventually suffer from such surgery, there needs no gift of prophecy to foretell. However, out of much evil comes some good. The Committee which examines into the cost of the army and navy can hardly turn away from an inquiry into their fitness for their purposes and in the hope of contributing our share towards a right understanding of the subject, we now crave attention to the results of some reading and more thought in regard to the constitution of the former body, and its adaptation to the extent and legitimate wants of the empire.

The point at which England ought to aim in the arrangement of her military establishments we take to be this,-that she shall have at all times on foot, and in a state of perfect efficiency, such an amount of force as shall give confidence to her Government in its negotiations with foreign powers, and ensure both the mother country and our innumerable dependencies from the hazard of sustaining loss by a coup-de-main. To go further during a season of peace to recruit our army till it should vie in numbers with those of the Continent-far more to put arms into the hands of our entire male population, because France maintains its National Guard, and Prussia its Landwehr, would, in our opinion, be consummate folly. When states are circumscribed by lines of frontier more imaginary than real, they must always stand towards their neighbours on every side in an attitude more or less of distrust;--the safety of each depends upon its readiness to enter at any moment upon a campaign; and a campaign once opened, no matter on which side or for what cause, must be accepted as the first of a series of movements in a war of conquest. But a war of conquest, or even of aggression, is a sort of game which England will never play again till her rulers shall have lost their senses. There is no conceivable inducement of interest-there is no motive of ambition or vain glory, to lead us into such a blunder. It may be a point of honour with us, and, to a certain extent, of interest too, to keep what we have, no matter how intrinsically worthless many of our foreign possessions may be; but every. addition to their number can only increase our difficulties. Our hands are already stretched over a wider extent of the globe's surface than they can conveniently cover.

Our preparations in time of peace should be purely de

fensive;