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him from "conveying the most trivial thoughts in the most fantastic language."
Some poets, to preclude all hindrance to continuous contemplation, have turned their backs upon the bustling world, and secluded themselves in some sequestered nooks. Kirke White hated the busy haunts of men; Wordsworth could only distil his diluted metaphysics in presence of the mountain rill; Cowper loved the alcove and grove with its trees and drooping branches; and pious Herbert delighted in the seclusion of Bemerton with its quaint church, porch, and little graveyard. Mr Tennyson also, for some time, has retired from the world— the world where men learn to know their fellows, where love, sympathy, and generosity are kept alive by the sight of pain, grief, and sorrow. No man may hope to be a great poet without a ripe knowledge of man's ways to man. And such knowledge is not to be gained in dell or dingle. We know what happened to Wordsworth and Southey when they took to the woods and forests. And Coleridge wrote and spoke his best under the hum of the great metropolis. It is not, therefore, surprizing that Mr Tennyson's sympathies should contract, that he should forget the aspect of every-day life, the strength of love, jealousy, envy, and revenge, during his seclusion from the world. It is no wonder to us that Mr Tennyson has not a warm place like Shakespeare, Burns, Dickens, and Sir Walter Scott in the hearts of the multitude. First of all he has written for a class of supreme beings—the educated class, we believe, whatever this may mean. Then the characters he brings before his audience lived so long ago, and so little is known about them that few if any are interested either in their doings or sayings. And then what they do and what they say is so absurdly artificial, bombastic, and far removed from common sense, that
