should catch glimpses of a face not smiling, as we expected, but itself sorrowing. Such a double-faced quibbling with melancholy leads one to reflect on the intimate mixture of laughter and tears in some forms of art, on the slender partition in human life between joy and sadness, and on what may be called the ambiguity of the emotions. These stand so near together and pass so easily one into the other for the reason that their cause is ambiguous; for regret and disappointment, like the merry accidents of life, though to different ends, spring from a kind of disparity between expectation and event. The only peculiarity of Hood is that he uses the juggling with words more consciously than other poets to express the juggling realities of fate. So it is that we feel nothing incongruous in the epithet of Canon Ainger when he points to the line, "And twit me with the spring," in The Song of the Shirt, as containing the most "pathetic" pun in the language. So, too, were it not for the levity of the term, the ambiguity of sleep and morn and the soul's secret mistrust in The Death-Bed might almost be called punning: We watch'd her breathing thro' the night, Her breathing soft and low, As in her breast the wave of life Kept heaving to and fro! So silently we seem'd to speak- As we had lent her half our powers Our very hopes belied our fears, We thought her dying when she slept, For when the morn came dim and sad- Her quiet eyelids closed-she had Is our perception here merely quickened by our familiarity with the equivocating ways of the writer, or has this habit really led him on more audaciously than others to that verge of sentiment where the instrument of pathos is almost confused with that of humour? The latter is the case, I think; for I observe that he carries this same tendency not only into his other pathetic poems (making of this same likeness of sleep and death in one passage of his Hero and Leander, at least, a pure conceit), but into all the emotions. It would be tedious to hunt out the various illustrations of this lurking wit in his poems of awe and regret and indignation and fancy; it would even tend to disconcert us in our enjoyment of his delicate craftsmanship. Only one example I cannot pass over, for its comment on the ambiguous nature of beauty: O saw ye not fair Ines? She's gone into the West, To dazzle when the sun is down, With morning blushes on her cheek, To Poe these lines had "an inexpressible charm❞—as indeed to whom have they not?— and I think it is not extravagant to say that some part here of that "petulant, impatient sorrow" (the word is too strong) which Poe connected with the incomplete realisation of beauty in art, is due to the teasing duplicity introduced by the word "West." The emotional impression of the whole poem is too pure to class it as a conceit; it is metaphor of the finest sort. Yet withal the realism of the action of the second line, the insistence on the similarity of physical motion, adds a certain whimsical element, as if a metaphor might at the same time be a conceit and-let us not say a pun, buta play on words. Beauty, these verses would seem to say, is the most fantastic of creatures, submitting to our clumsy speech only in the forms of similitude, as indeed it owes its fascination to some obscure similitude the other term of which we seek and never quite grasp; it is the equivocation of matter and spirit. Not the least of the interests attaching to Hood's work is this persistent amphibology of his genius. Better than in almost any other writer, we can, in him, follow poetic wit through all its gradations of quibbling and conceit and metaphor, where, at least, these are not blended together in a kind of sublimated punning. We seem thus at times to come very close to the equivocation that lies in the human heart, too close, it may be, for the uses of great poetry. We are reminded too coarsely that the adornments of literature are only figures of speech, just as Brutus, after serving virtue for a lifetime, found it in the end, not a thing, but a word. TENNYSON WHATEVER changes may occur in the fame of Tennyson-and undoubtedly at the present hour it is passing into a kind of obscuration— he can never be deprived of the honour of representing, more almost than any other single poet of England, unless it be Dryden, a whole period of national life. Tennyson is the Victorian age. His Poems, Chiefly Lyrical had been published only seven years when the Queen came to the throne in 1837; he succeeded Wordsworth as poet-laureate in 1850; and from that time to his death in 1892 he was the official voice of the Court and the acknowledged spokesman of those who were leading the people through that long period of transition. was something typical of the heart of England in his birth and childhood. For what better nursery can be imagined for such a poet than one of those village rectories where the ancient traditions of the land are preserved with religious reverence and the pride of station is unaccompanied by the vanity of wealth? And what scenery could be more appropriate than the 64 There |