Yet in “The Princess,” perhaps, Mr. Tennyson rises higher still.  The idyllic manner alternates with the satiric, the pathetic, even the sublime, by such imperceptible gradations, and continual delicate variations of key, that the harmonious medley of his style becomes the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet harmonious fairyland in which his fancy ranges.  In this work, too, Mr. Tennyson shows himself more than ever the poet of the day.  In it more than ever the old is interpenetrated with the new—­the domestic and scientific with the ideal and sentimental.  He dares, in every page, to make use of modern words and notions, from which the mingled clumsiness and archaism of his compeers shrinks, as unpoetical.  Though, as we just said, his stage is an ideal fairyland, yet he has reached the ideal by the only true method—­by bringing the Middle Age forward to the Present one, and not by ignoring the Present to fall back on a cold and galvanised Medievalism; and thus he makes his “Medley” a mirror of the nineteenth century, possessed of its own new art and science, its own new temptations and aspirations, and yet grounded on, and continually striving to reproduce, the forms and experiences of all past time.  The idea, too, of “The Princess” is an essentially modern one.  In every age women have been tempted, by the possession of superior beauty, intellect, or strength of will, to deny their own womanhood, and attempt to stand alone as men, whether on the ground of political intrigue, ascetic saintship, or philosophic pride.  Cleopatra and St. Hedwiga, Madame de Stael and the Princess, are merely different manifestations of the same self-willed and proud longing of woman to unsex herself, and realise, single and self-sustained, some distorted and partial notion of her own as to what the “angelic life” should be.  Cleopatra acted out the pagan ideal of an angel; St. Hedwiga, the medieval one; Madame de Stael hers, with the peculiar notions of her time as to what “spirituel” might mean; and in “The Princess” Mr. Tennyson has embodied the ideal of that nobler, wider, purer, yet equally fallacious, because equally unnatural, analogue, which we may meet too often up and down England now.  He shows us the woman, when she takes nor stand on the false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral punishment, by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh:  not even her vast purposes of philanthropy can preserve her, for they are built up, not on the womanhood which God has given her, but on her own self-will; they change, they fall, they become inconsistent, even as she does herself, till, at last, she loses all feminine sensibility; scornfully and stupidly she rejects and misunderstands the heart of man; and then falling from pride to sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity, she punishes sisterly love as a crime, robs the mother of her child, and becomes all but a vengeful fury, with all the peculiar faults of woman, and none of the peculiar excellences of man.