But the great charm and ornament of that house has vanished; the young steps have wandered forth, and found other homes; and it must now be a somewhat solitary spot to him who formerly found collected into it all that made life beautiful. Nay, steam, as little as time, has respected the sanctity of the poet's home, but has drawn up its roaring iron steeds opposite to its gate, and has menaced to rush through it, and lay waste its charmed solitude. In plain words, I saw the stakes of a projected railway running in an ominous line across the very lawn, and before the very windows of Elleray.

  WALLER BRYAN PROCTER.

As the most beautiful flowers are found in the most arid deserts, so out of the dry study of law comes forth now and then the most genial and tender spirit of poetry. Such has been the case with Mr. Procter, or Barry Cornwall, for we delight in that old favorite nom de guerre; and although I have been able to obtain but little knowledge of his homes and haunts, still these volumes would be incomplete without some notice of a man whose writings hold so firm a place in the public heart.

About seven-and-twenty years ago, Mr. Procter, then a young man, just called to the bar, and in very delicate health, published his first volume of poetry. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Campbell, and Leigh Hunt, were then pouring out volume after volume; and Scott, who was crowned with the laurels of his metrical romances, was riveting the attention of the whole world by his earlier romances; while Crabbe, as if woke up out of his slumber of twenty-two years by this great constellation of genius, had just put forth his new work, the Tales of the Hall. It was not a moment when a poet of ordinary power had any chance of sustaining his existence; but the young aspirant stood among those gigantic men, as one who, if not equal to them in all points at that moment, was yet kindred with them; and, although the Sicilian story, Diego de Montilla, Mirandola, and the Flood of Thessaly, have rather become pleasant memories than the actualities of the present day, the poet has established a lasting reputation by his volume of "English Songs, and other small Poems"—a volume, in which there are gems of as noble and perfect poetry as any in the language, and which abounds with the most healthy, manly sentiment, and the broadest sympathies with suffering and struggling humanity. It is now the fashion to sympathize with the people—and a noble fashion it is—the only fear being of this otherwise holy Christian sentiment becoming, in some minds, morbid, if not mawkish. In Barry Cornwall, it is as genuine as any other part of his nature; feigning and falsehood are as impossible to it as darkness to the sun. He has the clearest understanding of moral truth, and a detestation of the cold, sordid spirit of the world. According to his faith—

and like a true man, who proclaims no more than he himself practices, his song becomes a watchword in the cause of man. In confirmation of this, let me select one little poem, A Lyric of London, which contains a deeper moral than most sermons.

Again, here is another poem, worthy to take its place beside Burns's A Man's a Man for a' that.

Mr. Procter was born and spent his youth at Finchley, in a house which we understand is now pulled down. He was educated for the bar. He was some years at school at Harrow, where he was the cotemporary of the present Duke of Devonshire, Lord Byron, and Sir Robert Peel. On leaving Harrow, it had been the intention of his father to send him to one of the universities; but from this he was deterred, in consequence of the son of some friend or acquaintance having run a wild and ruinous career at one of these seminaries of extravagance and dissipation. From Harrow he, therefore, went to Calne, in Wiltshire, where he remained for some time under the care of an excellent man of the name of Atherton, who lived, it was said, in the house which at one time had been the residence of Coleridge, and opposite to another called the "Doctor's house," because it had once been occupied by Dr. Priestley. Two miles from Calne was Bremhill, the rector of which place, William Lisle Bowles, was on friendly terms with young Procter.

With a head and heart much more fitted for the noble business of poetry than law, Mr. Procter devoted himself for twenty years to his profession, until a few years ago he was appointed one of the Government Commissioners of Lunacy, with a good income, but with less leisure than ever for his favorite studies. He has resided altogether in London, for some time, in Gray's-inn; and after his marriage, with the step-daughter of Mr. Basil Montague, in what was in those days a very pretty cottage and suitable poet's home, at No. 5, Grove-end-place, St. John's-wood; and latterly in Upper Harley-place, Cavendish-square; where we sincerely hope he may yet find leisure, if not to write some noble drama, for which we consider him eminently qualified, at least to enrich the lyrical poetry of his country with fresh lays that will add honor to his reputation, at the same time that they assist struggling humanity in its great contest with the cruelty and selfishness of the world.

There is a healthy, active vigor about all the latter writings of Barry Cornwall, that show that he has never yet fairly and fully developed his whole power. His reputation is of the first class, but every one feels, in reading one of his lyrics, that he would not surprise us now to come forth with some high and stirring drama of real life, that would stamp him as a true tragic poet. The elements of this lie everywhere in his poems. There is a clear and decided dramatic tact and cast of thought. Pathos and indignation against wrong live equally and vividly in him. His thoughts and feelings are put forth with a genuineness and a perspicuous life, that tell at once on the reader, making him feel how real and how earnest is his spirit. Spite of the long and continuous labors of his daily life, we shall still trust to some future outburst of his powers and impulses in a fitting form. In the mean time, the prompt and quick spirit of his lyrics is doing great service to the cause of progress far and wide.

  ALFRED TENNYSON.

Alfred Tennyson moves on his way through life heard, but by the public unseen. We might put to him a question similar to that which Wordsworth put to the cuckoo:—

And our question would have like answer. That is, we should get just as much from the man as Wordsworth got from the cuckoo. We should have to look wise, and add—

Many an admiring reader may have said with Solomon of old—"I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he answered me not." If you want a popular poet, you generally know pretty well where to look for him. In the first place, you may make certain that London contains him. You may trace him to a coterie, probably a very recherché and exclusive one; you may look for him at midnight in some hot and crowded drawing-room, surrounded by the fairest of incense burners, and breathing volumes of ambrosial essences with a very complacent air; you may find him as the great gun of a popular periodical; you may meet him at Rogers's at breakfast; you may follow him from one great dinner table to another, and at last to that of the lord mayor. But in few or none of these places will you find Alfred Tennyson. "He has gone down into his garden, to his beds of spices, to feed in his garden and gather lilies." You may hear his voice, but where is the man? He is wandering in some dream-land, beneath the shade of old and charmed forests, by far-off shores, where

by the old milldam, thinking of the merry miller and his pretty daughter; or is wandering over the open wolds, where

"Norland whirlwinds blow."

From all these places—from the silent corridor of an ancient convent; from some shrine where a devoted knight recites his vows; from the drear monotony of "the moated grange," or the ferny forest beneath the "talking oak"—comes the voice of Tennyson, rich, dreamy, passionate, yet not impatient; musical with the airs of chivalrous ages, yet mingling in his song the theme and the spirit of those that are yet to come.

The genius of Tennyson is essentially retiring, meditative, spiritual, yet not metaphysical; ambitious only that itself, and not the man, shall be seen, heard, and live. So that his song can steal forth; catch by a faint but aerial prelude the ear quick to seize on the true music of Olympus; and then, with growing and ever swelling symphonies, still more ethereal, still fuller of wonder, love, and charmed woe, can travel on amid the listening and spell-bound multitude, an invisible spirit of melodious power, expanding, soaring aloft, sinking deep, coming now as from the distant sea, and filling all the summer air; so that it can thus triumph in its own celestial energy, the poet himself would rather not be found. He seems to steal away under the covert of friendly boughs; to be gone to caves and hiding crags, or to follow the stream of the gray moorland, gathering

The orator may climb heights of most imperial influence over the public mind, the statesman of power over the public destiny, the merchant may gather stupendous wealth from every zone, the patriot produce and carry on to success the most dazzling schemes for human good: these disturb not the equanimity of Tennyson—the spirit of poetry that is conferred on him he accepts as his fortune, his duty, and his glory. In short, he has all that he can conceive of, or desire. He knows that through that, his applauses, though less riotous than those of the orator, will endure the longer; that he has in it a commission to work with or against the statesman, as that man may be good or evil; that even into the ear of the princeliest wealth he can whisper a startling word of human counsel, or can move to deeds of mercy; and that there is no patriot who can be more patriotic than him whose voice, from day to day and year to year, is heard in the stillest and most teachable hours of the most amply endowed and teachable natures. Over all the faculties, the ranks, the influences of human life, poetry maintains a suggestive and immortal supremacy, for it becomes the more aspiring spirit of the age in the school and the closet ere it comes forth upon the world. It mingles itself with whatever is generous, ambitious, perceptive of greatness and of virtue, and often speaks in the man in power by a deed of glorious beneficence that falls like a blessing from heaven on the heart of afflicted genius.

Of this profound and blessed reliance on the all-sufficiency of his art, perhaps no poet ever furnished a more complete example than Alfred Tennyson. There is nothing stirring, nothing restless, nothing ambitious, in its tone; it has no freaks and eccentricities by which it seeks to strike the public notice. There are no evidences of any secret yet palpable artifices at work to urge it on, and thrust it before you in magazines and reviews. Quiet in itself, it comes quietly under your eye, naturally as the grass grows or the bird sings, and you see, hear, and love it. From this absence of all bustle and parade of introduction, or of the violence of attack upon it from the display of prominent antagonist principles, political or theological, as in the cases of Byron and Shelley, we are often surprised to find Tennyson still wholly unread in quarters where poetry is read with much avidity, and to hear others lamenting that he does not put forth a poem more commensurate with his purely poetic temperament. But the very nature of Tennyson's genius is to be contented with what it is. It is happy in itself as the bird upon the bough. It is rolled into itself, living and rejoicing in its own being and blessedness. It has no deadly thirst for draughts of spirits from other worlds, no feverish wrestlings for mere notoriety, no ostentatious display of gigantic agonies and writhings under a dark destiny, no pictures of plunging down into depths of mystery and of woe beyond the diving powers of ordinary mortals. It is healthy, clear, joyous, for the most part, and musical as nature itself. In entering into the region of Tennyson's poetry you enter one of sun and calm. The land of romance, of dream, of fairy; the land of beauty, glory, and repose, stretching on through all the regions of the earth, wherever genius has alighted in any age, wherever mind has put forth its forms of divinest grace. It belongs to what may be termed the romantic school, yet it is often purely classical. You see in such poems as the Lotus Eaters, Œnone, Ulysses, etc., that Tennyson loves to sit by the immortal wells of Homer; to wander amid the godlike habitants of the Greek Elysium. But whether there, or at the court of "great Haroun Alraschid," or in the spell-bound castles of German Legend, or in our own middle ages, he alike infuses into all his subjects the spirit of the romantic. That spirit which at once invests every thing which it touches with the vitality of beauty, of tenderness, and of purity heavenly, and yet—

Alfred Tennyson loves to individualize; to select some person or scene from the multitude or the mass, and to throw himself wholly into it. From the heart of this personage or group of personages he speaks for the time, the unerring oracle of human nature. We are seized, engrossed, charmed, entranced, for the space of this impersonation; for it is human nature in all the power and beauty of its greatness, of its passions and its sufferings, of its eternal yearnings and its unquenchable love, its daring, its crime and desolation, that unfolds to you its history and its inner life. There is no man, except Shakspeare, who has more thoroughly and eminently possessed this faculty of interpretation, of comprehending and giving voice to the infinite laws and movements of universal humanity; and there is no other who has been endowed for the purpose with a gift of speech so rich, genial, and specially demonstrative. We have no misgivings, as we read Tennyson, whether any thing be poetry or not; we have no feeling of a want in the phraseology. Thought, language, imagery, all flow together from one source; that of a genius creative in all the attributes of life, or in the life itself—in color, taste, motion, grace, and sentiment. Whatever is produced, lives. It is no dead form; it is no half-sentient form; it is perfect in spirit, in beauty, and in abode.

The poetry of Tennyson, like that of Shakspeare, seems to possess a music of its own. It is evidently evolved amid the intense play of melodies which are as much a part of the individual mind itself, as the harmonies of nature are a part of nature. Like Shakspeare, Tennyson is especially fond of, or rather haunted by musical refrains, and airs that are not invented but struck out; that can not be conceived by any labor of thought, but are inspired; and that once communicated to the atmosphere, will go chiming on forever.

Of these refrains, Oriana, and the Lady of Shalott, present striking examples.

Or you may take the very first little melody with which this volume opens.

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.

The poems which immediately follow this, The May Queen, and New-Year's Eve, are practical examples of the truth just enunciated—

The natural beauty of The May Queen, and the exquisite pathos of the New-Year's Eve, have made them universally known. In the second volume the poet seems particularly to have endeavored to enforce his ideas of the dignity of a virtuous nature, which stands in its own divine worth, far above all artificial distinctions. His Gardener's Daughter, the ballad of Lady Clara, and that most delightful one of The Lord of Burleigh, all teach it. Lady Godiva is an example of that high devotion to the public good, which is prepared to make the most entire sacrifice of self; and of which history, here and there, amid its mass of selfishness and crime, presents us with some glorious examples—none more glorious than that of the beautiful Godiva. But Locksley Hall and The Two Voices are the most brilliant of all Tennyson's productions, and among the most perfect things in the language.

We can scarcely conceive any thing more perfectly musical and intrinsically poetical than Locksley Hall. It is the soliloquy of a wronged, high, and passionate nature. The speaker, a young man capable of great things, wars against the false maxims of the present time, yet sees how it is advancing into something better and greater. He perceives how mind is moving forward into its destined empire. He feels and makes us feel how great is this age and this England in which we live. Some of the thoughts and expressions stand prominent even amid the superb beauty of the whole, and have never been surpassed in their felicitous truth and pictorial power. The description of his life at that country hall, and the love of himself and his cousin Amy, are fine; but how much finer these stanzas, the result of the fickle cousin marrying a mere clod with a title. The certain consequence of the wife's mind, which would have soared and strengthened in the association with his own, sinking to the level of the brute she had allied herself to, is most admirably told. How constantly do we see this effect in life, but where ever has it been, and in so few words, so fully expressed?

With a lover's fancy he would seek comfort in persuading himself that his love was dead, but quickly spurns from him this idea. Every line which follows this—the picture of the repentant wife, and the drunken husband, "hunting in his dreams," the child that roots out regret, the mother grown into the matron schooling this child, a daughter, into the world's philosophy—all is masterly. Not less so the portraiture of the age:—

How finely, in the next stanzas, are portrayed the expectations of the ardent youth, the light of London, and the imagined progress of scenic and real life!

Disappointed in love, and sickened in hope of civilized life, the speaker dreams, for a moment, of flying to some savage land, and leading the exciting life of a tropical hunter. In the reaction of his thoughts how vividly is expressed the precious preëminence of European existence, with all its attendant evils!

Who shall say, after this, that Alfred Tennyson wants power? There speaks the man of this moving age. There speaks the spirit baptized into the great spirit of progress. In the silence of his meditative retreat the poet sees the world rolling before him, and is struck with the majesty of its mind subduing its physical mass to its uses, and trampling on time, space, and the far greater evils—prejudice, false patriotism, and falser ideas of glory. Brotherhood, peace, and comfort advance out of the school and the shop, and happiness sits securely beneath the guardianship of

"The parliament of man, the federation of the world."

Alfred Tennyson has given many a fatal blow to many an old and narrow maxim in his poems; he has breathed into his latter ones the generous and the victorious breath of noblest philanthropy, the offspring of the great renovator—the Christian religion. This will give him access to the bosoms of the multitude—

"Men our brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new;"

and his vigorous song will cheer them at their toil, and nerve them to more glorious efforts. Of the hold which his poetry has already taken on the public heart, a striking instance was lately given. The anonymous author of The New Timon stepped out of his way and his subject to represent Tennyson's muse as a puling school-miss. The universal outburst of indignation from the press scared the opprobrious lines speedily out of the snarler's pages. A new edition was quickly announced, from which they had wisely vanished.

Perhaps, however, the crown of all Tennyson's verse is The Two Voices. I have said that he is not metaphysical. He is better. Leaving to others to build and rebuild theories of the human mind, Tennyson deals with its palpable movements like a genuine philosopher, and one of the highest order, a Christian philosopher. The Two Voices are the voice of an animated assurance in the heart, and the voice of skepticism. In this poem there is no person who has passed through the searching, withering ordeal of religious doubts and fears as to the spiritual permanence of our existence—and who has not?—but will find in these simple stanzas the map and history of their own experience. The clearness, the graphic power, and logical force and acumen which distinguish this poem are of the highest order. There is nothing in the poems of Wordsworth which can surpass, if it can equal it. Let us take, as our last quotation, the closing portion of this lyric, the whole of which can not be read with too much attention. Here the combat with Apollyon in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is most simply and beautifully put an end to by the buoyant spirit of nature, and man walking amid his human ties hand in hand with her and piety.

So much for the poetry, but still where is the poet? It may be supposed by what has already been said, that he is not very readily to be found. Next to nothing has yet been known of him or his haunts. It has been said that his poetry showed from internal evidence that he came somewhere out of the fens. In three fourths of his verses there is something about "glooming flats," "the clustered marish-mosses," a poplar, a water-loving tree, that