Remember you that pleasant day
When, after roving in the woods—
'Twas April then—I came and lay
Beneath those gummy chestnut buds?
A water-rat from off the bank
Plunged in the stream. With idle care,
Down looking through the sedges rank,
I saw your troubled image there.
If you remember, you had set
Upon the narrow casement-edge
A long green box of mignonette,
And you were leaning on the ledge.
The poet's truth to nature in his "gummy chestnut buds," and to art in the "long green box" of mignonette, and that masterly touch of likening the first intrusion of love into the virgin bosom of the miller's daughter to the plunging of a water-rat into the mill-dam—these are beauties which, we do not fear to say, equal anything even in Keats.'
The most ardent admirers of Tennyson's earlier poems must confess that, in instances such as these, the poet laid himself open to the ridicule of an ill-natured reviewer.
One more example of this, and we have done with the Laureate's more youthful efforts. In the 'Dream of Fair Women,' we all know the exquisite description of Iphigenia, and have most of us noted that flaw in the closing lines,
The tall masts quiver'd as they lay afloat;
The temples, and the people, and the shore;
One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat,
Slowly, and nothing more.
The critic's chance here is of course inevitable.
'What touching simplicity! What pathetic resignation! "He cut my throat—nothing more!" One might ask, "What more she would have?"'
The line has been altered in the later editions of the poet's works; but we have merely recalled some of these earlier defects of the Laureate's muse to show that even great poets—though born, not made—must always owe much to long and elaborate culture, and must pass through the cru-
