beauty of the vegetation with which the land is clothed, a vegetation which Mr. Wallace declares to be, even as regards rich masses of color, far above the splendors of tropic vegetation; and we may learn also, that this beauty comes in a large degree from the "useful trouble of the rain."

Between English men and English trees and grass and flowers there is a peculiar sympathy. It is not in tropical and sub-tropical countries only that the vegetable world seems, even in its happiest moments, to be oppressed by the dread of the more cruel forces of nature, such as the eye of the sun in his fierce and pitiless moods and the cruel breath of the wind, which are waiting, the one to burn it up, the other to shatter it.

strong as the bond of mutual enjoyment, need we go far in search of an explanation of that great link of affection between English people and the flowers and trees and grass of England?

Perhaps, indeed, the chief source of the fascination of country life for Englishmen, perhaps the reason why the final goal of every English gentleman (whatever intermediate ambitions may distract him for a time) is to retire to some old Locksley Hall or Moated Grange, and become, as far as his head gardener will allow him, a cultivator of trees and flowers, lies in the fact that the vegetation of the old place seems conscious of his presence, seems to know him and welcome him. Some will, no doubt, smile at this as an idle Even in the temperate climes of Con- fancy. It cannot be denied, however, tinental Europe the vegetable world that from Chaucer down to Shakeseems to have a kind of ancestral remi-speare, from Shakespeare down to the niscence of that terror of the sun and present day, between the people and wind which tropical vegetation shows; the vegetation of England the link has or, at least, it does not seem to be been uncommonly close. It cannot be tasting so true an enjoyment of exist- denied that, while the poet of other ence as vegetable life seems to enjoy in countries often (though, of course, not England, whose hottest wind is in some always) speaks of flowers and trees and degree cooled, and whose bitterest bliz-grass as beautiful pictures, part of a zard is in some degree tempered, by the still larger picture, the English poet protecting breath of the genial sea. It never speaks of them in this way, but is not only "the liberties of England" | speaks of them as beautiful creatures that, as Douglas Jerrold used to say, that have a conscious enjoyment of life 66 are preserved in brine." The delicate akin to his own. air and the moist breezes that she owes to her seas lend the brilliant living green to her grass and leaves, and the soft and pearly bloom of living glow to the complexion of her flowers. other words, it is the very quality of our climate which foreigners find uncomfortable that makes, not only every flower, but every leaf and blade of grass, seem to enjoy the air it breathes." Even before science had shown that to draw the line between conscious animal life and what is called unconscious vegetable life is impossible, there was a sort of half-recognition in the human mind of a sentience in plants. And if in most Continental countries, perhaps in all, the vegetable world seems to be conscious of the insecurity of its joys, if there is no bond of sympathy so

In

From Tennyson with his

Groves that looked a paradise

Of blossom, over sheets of hyacinth
That seemed the heavens upbreaking thro'
the earth,

up to Shakespeare with his

Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty,
then up again to Chaucer's loving de-
scriptions of the English flowers, espe-
cially of the daisy, the poet makes the
vegetable world share in his enjoyment.
Nay, we might go further still; we
might go right up to the earliest of all
our nature-lyrics, the lovely "Cuckoo
Song" of the first half of the thirteenth
century, where the mead "blows," the

seed
"grows,'
springs in an enjoyment as conscious as
that of the cuckoo, the lamb, and the
buck.

" and the new wood But as he grows this, among other of the faculties of the poet, comes in and aids, strengthens, and enriches his poetry. This, however, was not the case with Tennyson. His eye was as true when he wrote "Mariana in the Moated Grange as when he flashed upon us the concentrated pictures of his latest volume.

Summer is icumen in ;
Loudè sing, cuckoo ;

Groweth seed, and bloweth mead,
And springeth the wood new.
Sing, Cuckoo !

Ewe bleateth after lamb;
Loweth after calvè cow;

Bullock sterteth, bucke verteth;
Merrie sing, cuckoo.

Cuckoo, Cuckoo.

A lover of the vegetable life of England could not fail to be also a lover of the streams, the lakes, the meres, and the brooks, that do so much to foster that life. Tennyson shares Wordsworth's delight in the effects of light He has, and shade upon fresh water. perhaps, nothing equal to Wordsworth's The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Floats double, swan and shadow; but then he gives us in

The long light shakes across the lakes a picture which can never be forgotten. And in the use of the plural "levels," in this description in the "Morte d'Arthur" of a lake under the wintry moon,

he achieves a veritable miracle of real-
istic picture:

He, stepping down
By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,

Came on the shining levels of the lake.

He is great whenever he touches a river, greater still whenever he touches a brook.

To him, indeed, a brook is almost as much a living thing as the trees that overhang it, the cresses that live under its stream, and the fish that glide over its gravelly bottom.

And if Tennyson is great as a painter of the trees, the grass, and the flowers of England, he is great also as a painter

And here, did space permit, a very remarkable characteristic of Tennyson's might be touched upon. The biologists tell us that the history of the progress of organisms, from the primitive condition to the more complex structures, can be traced by the broader of the beautiful creatures that live and broader division of sense from sense. As a rule, it is perhaps the same with the growth of poets as painters of nature. At first the sense of music, the sense of color, the sense of form, seem so blended that the power of seizing upon physiognomic details, which the prose writer can very early command, seems to be beyond the poet.

among them; though here, perhaps, other English poets are at least his equals, especially poets like Wordsworth, Scott, and Matthew Arnold.

As a rule, perhaps he is more apt than any of these to treat animal life as part of the landscape, but in doing so he is second to none.

In painting birds he is especially

Keeps head against the freshets,

and is scarcely equalled by William Morris's description of "the bubblemaking bream.”

A yellow-banded bee did come, An' softly pitch, wi' hushèn hum, Upon a beän, an' there did sip, Upon a swayèn blossom's lip: An' there cried he, "Ay, I can zee This blossom's all a-zent vor me." There does not seem to be anything in Tennyson answering to this sweet method of entering into the consciousness of a field-mouse or of a bee by means of the dramatic insight that springs from a playful humor. If, however, this really is so, the lack is compensated for by his attitude towards what may be called the heroic side of the lower animals. There have been noble poems about the dog - his intelligence, his courage, his fidelity to man - but never one, perhaps, equal to Tennyson's "Owd Roa." And of one thing we may be always sure, that in describing animals, as in describing everything in nature, he never fails, either in accuracy of essential knowledge or in accuracy of nomenclature. How much of this incomparable exactitude in painting natural objects is the result of an inherent love of nature, and how much is due to the scholarly training through which his mind has passed, it might be difficult to say. For, of course, in gauging the strength of the nature instinct of a poet so scholarly as he, it is necessary to take into account the scholar's passion for exactitude. Without saying that Tennyson had the learning of Milton or of Ben Jonson, it may be said that his mind showed more of the scholarly habit than has been shown by the mind of any other English poet. Whatsoever object, either of nature or of man's art, might be brought before him, he would confront it with that trained eye for seeing truly which characterizes the scholar. Hence, it is not only when

There is one poetic way of approaching the animal kingdom which must always be mentioned when the poetical treatment of the lower animals is under consideration - a certain playfully humorous way, which for convenience may perhaps be said to express the "mood of Burns." Not that Burns was the first who knew this mood, but he who wrote the lines to a field-mouse takes his place as its greatest master. It is the mood in which the poet's humor sheds upon the lower animals the sunshine of a love that is none the less deep for being playful—that humor which Uncle Toby generally sheds upon human kind, but which he can sometimes throw upon a blue-bottle fly. Oddly enough, the two nineteenthcentury poets who have inherited most of Burns's mood in regard to the lower animals are two who, in other respects, are unlike him, and are also the opposites of each other Miss Christina put into comparison with poets who, Rossetti and William Barnes. Next however great, are proverbially inacto these comes Miss Ingelow; indeed, curate — poets, for instance, like Victor she might almost be ranged alongside Hugo, who, in his "Travailleurs de la them. There is room here for only one Mer," restores the great auk, and eninstance of the quality indicated, and it dows him with wings long and strong, had better be taken from the Dorset- and sets him triumphantly sailing like shire poet, whose admirable poems are the stormy petrel on the blast, and pertoo much neglected just now. forms many another miracle of the like

kind in what may be called poetical | eyes, than the martin's throbbing throat zoology - but even when compared of burnished silver, and shorter tail, with the best observers of nature Ten- would have come, and both swallow nyson seems to be almost the only one and martin would have got mixed up in who never goes wrong. one blurred picture. A very interesting illustration of Tennyson's passion for accuracy of nomenclature may be given here.

When we see that so true an observer as Barnes, to whom we are indebted for so many pictures of bird-life as accurate as they are lovely, will sometimes seem Some time ago a friend of his, when to put into the missel-thrush's nest the touching upon the probable effect of the eggs of the song-thrush, forgetting that growth of science upon the nomenclathe texture of the nest of the song- ture of poets, made the following thrush is a web of woven roots mixed remark : "To call a rook a crow, as a with moss, and is lined with a cup good English poet once did, showing "modelled," as Clare would describe it, thereby that he did not know that a "of wood and clay," we cannot but crow is no more like a rook, either in marvel at Tennyson's infallibility. Nor appearance or in habit, than a horse is does he ever, by any careless departure like a zebra, will, in a hundred years from a severely accurate nomenclature, from this time nay, in fifty years allow the reader to infer an inaccuracy be an unpardonable sin.' Of course it of image in the poet's mind where, per- had never entered the writer's head to haps, no real inaccuracy exists, as is so glance at the superb line in "Locksley often the case with poets whose inac- Hall" where the generic word " crow curacy is that of nomenclature merely. is used in describing the leader of the To him a swallow is a swallow, a martin rookery. But he received from the is a martin. Never is the name of the poet a most interesting letter, in which one given to the other. And this is of the following words occur :— more importance than the reader may perhaps imagine. When, in the "Day Dream," he tells us that outside the enchanted palace

Roof-haunting martins warm their eggs, a picture is at once called up of the snow-white throats gleaming at the little doorways of the nests of the guests of summer, the "temple-haunting martlets" of Shakespeare.

To use the word swallow and the word martin indiscriminately, as almost all poets but Shakespeare and Tennyson do, is to damage the effect of the picture in the same way that would be done by a painter who should try to make blue produce the effect of blue-green. Had he said

the North, rooks are called
In my county, and, I believe, all thro'

99 crows.

I

"The many-wintered crow" in the line to which you allude is the old rook. didn't wish to use rook twice in the same sentence.

Yet this exactitude has in it nothing of the laborious cataloguing which we see in poets of the school of Erasmus Darwin, and sometimes even in Wordsworth. As an artist, indeed, Roof-haunting swallows warm their eggs, Tennyson's instinctive skill in the selecthough the added "w's" might have tion of details is worthy of the deepest increased the alliterative music of the attention. It came to him as a mere line, the reader's imagination would boy. Even when he wrote "Mariana have been baffled by conjecture. No in the Moated Grange " he knew by insooner would the ruddy throat and the long forked tail of the true swallow have formed a picture on the reader's

stinct that, inasmuch as the literary artist's medium is not truly objective, like that of painting and sculpture, but

entirely symbolical and subjective, his | ters, moving clouds, and the winds that
details must never seem to be painted move them, were his delight; and with
for their own sake, as in the plastic arts, all his love of forest-scenery, the woods
but must be supposed to exist for some in order to be thoroughly enjoyed must
ulterior purpose; that, just as in narra- be swaying to the storm. The uncer-
tive poetry details must seem to be in- tainty and vague outline of all cloud
troduced as necessary parts of the action pageantry had for Shelley a peculiar
(otherwise the poet's own imagination fascination. There are natures to whom
will appear to have cooled), so in de- the appeal of cloud-scenery is stronger
scriptive poetry details must seem to than that of the loveliest landscape;
exist because the sentiment underlying but though Tennyson was not one of
the description appears to be expressed these, he used to lie on his back on the
by these details. On this point some of Down at Farringford or on the lawn for
the most admirable descriptive poets the pleasure of seeing the cloud-scenery.
will sometimes go wrong.
And at Aldworth, once, when he was
rejoicing in some marvellous sky-phe-
nomena, he was deeply interested in an
account a friend gave him of a man
who, having after years of toil accumu-
lated a large fortune and become the
owner of two or three country-houses,
would on a Sunday afternoon in sum-
mer take a chair and sit for hours in
his stableyard, closed in by buildings
from any glimpse of the surrounding
country, in order to watch the clouds
overhead and the swallows darting and
skimming underneath them. This hav-
ing been the man's Sunday-afternoon
recreation when a poor boy, as he sat
in a little bricked court in London, he
had learnt that the best way to enjoy
cloud-scenery is to be shut away from
the other beauties of nature.

The delightful idyllist quoted above is not always perfect in this matter of selection. Take, for instance, the following lines in the lovely poem, "Milkèn Time : "

'Twer when the busy birds did vlee,
Wi' sheenèn wings, vrom tree to tree,
To build upon the mossy lim'
Their hollow nestes' rounded rim ;
The while the zun, a-zinkèn low,
Did roll along his evenèn bow,
I come along where wide-horn'd cows,
'Ithin a nook, a-screen'd by boughs,
Did stan' an' flip the white-hoop'd païls
Wi' heäiry tufts o' swingèn taïls.

Here the very fact that the widehorned breed of Hereford cows is so common in Dorset as to be almost universal, and the very fact that the hoops of the pails in Dorset, made of wood, The Rainbow" song in "Becket" are white, and unlike the metal hoops shows how he knew and loved that most of some other parts of England - facts fascinating of all aërial phenomena, the which have been advanced in defence rainbow. In describing it, however, he of these details - would have prevented has never equalled—indeed, who has ? Tennyson from using the compound-Byron's superb description of a rainadjectives given in the above quotation, bow at sea in "Don Juan." for they seem to be used with a self- There is in Tennyson's "Sea Faiconscious purpose apart from the senti-ries" a rather ambiguous ment of the poem- they seem to be one which would seem to allude to here in order to make poetry compete one of the loveliest of all visions, which with the plastic arts. may sometimes be seen in a small lake, and in a slowly moving stream like the Ouse, and even sometimes on the smooth sands of the East coast, when they are covered with a thin surface of sea-water a reflected rainbow. And the rainbow forms and flies on the land Over the islands free;

As a painter of cloud-scenery and other aërial effects, Tennyson must very likely be set below certain other nineteenth-century poets. Here Scott is great, Wordsworth greater, and Shelley and Hugo greatest of all. To Shelley, movement was almost a necessary quality of all natural beauty. Moving wa

a passage

And the rainbow lives in the curve of the
sand.

S