[1] Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians:  London,
    1830.  Histoire de la Poesie Provencale:  Paris, 1846.

It is to this rich repository that Mr. Tennyson has resorted for his material.  He has shown, as we think, rare judgment in the choice.  The Arthurian Romance has every recommendation that should win its way to the homage of a great poet.  It is national:  it is Christian.  It is also human in the largest and deepest sense; and, therefore, though highly national, it is universal; for it rests upon those depths and breadths of our nature to which all its truly great developments in all nations are alike essentially and closely related.  The distance is enough for atmosphere, not too much for detail; enough for romance, not too much for sympathy.  A poet of the nineteenth century, the Laureate has adopted characters, incidents, and even language in the main, instead of attempting to project them on a basis of his own in the region of illimitable fancy.  But he has done much more than this.  Evidently by reading and by deep meditation, as well as by sheer force of genius, he has penetrated himself down to the very core of his being, with all that is deepest and best in the spirit of the time, or the representation, with which he deals; and as others, using old materials, have been free to alter them in the sense of vulgarity or licence, so he has claimed and used the right to sever and recombine, to enlarge, retrench, and modify, for the purposes at once of a more powerful and elaborate art than his original presents, and of a yet more elevated, or at least of a far more sustained, ethical and Christian strain.

We are rather disposed to quarrel with the title of Idylls:  for no diminutive ([Greek:  eidullion]) can be adequate to the breadth, vigour, and majesty which belong to the subjects, as well as to the execution, of the volume.  The poet used the name once before; but he then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are yet like the disjoined figures from the pediment of the Parthenon in their dignity and force.  One indeed among Mr. Tennyson’s merits is, that he does not think it necessary to keep himself aloft by artificial effort, but undulates with his matter, and flies high or low as it requires.  But even in the humblest parts of these poems—­as where the little Novice describes the miniature sorrows and discipline of childhood—­the whole receives its tone from an atmosphere which is heroic, and which, even in its extremest simplicity, by no means parts company with grandeur, or ceases to shine in the reflected light of the surrounding objects.  Following the example which the poet has set us in a former volume, we would fain have been permitted, at least provisionally, to call these Idylls by the name of Books.  Term them what we may, there are four of them—­arranged, as we think, in an ascending scale.