No one, we are persuaded, can read this poem without feeling, when it ends, what may be termed the pangs of vacancy—­of that void in heart and mind for want of its continuance of which we are conscious when some noble strain of music ceases, when some great work of Raphael passes from the view, when we lose sight of some spot connected with high associations, or when some transcendent character upon the page of history disappears, and the withdrawal of it is like the withdrawal of the vital air.  We have followed the Guinevere of Mr. Tennyson through its detail, and have extracted largely from its pages, and yet have not a hope of having conveyed an idea of what it really is; still we have thought that in this way we should do it the least injustice, and we are also convinced that even what we have shown will tend to rouse an appetite, and that any of our readers, who may not yet have been also Mr. Tennyson’s, will become more eager to learn and admire it at first hand.

We have no doubt that Mr. Tennyson has carefully considered how far his subject is capable of fulfilling the conditions of an epic structure.  The history of Arthur is not an epic as it stands, but neither was the Cyclic song, of which the greatest of all epics, the “Iliad,” handles a part.  The poem of Ariosto is scarcely an epic, nor is that of Bojardo; but it is not this because each is too promiscuous and crowded in its brilliant phantasmagoria to conform to the severe laws of that lofty and inexorable class of poem?  Though the Arthurian romance be no epic, it does not follow that no epic can be made from out of it.  It is grounded in certain leading characters, men and women, conceived upon models of extraordinary grandeur; and as the Laureate has evidently grasped the genuine law which makes man and not the acts of man the base of epic song, we should not be surprised were he hereafter to realize the great achievement towards which he seems to be feeling his way.  There is a moral unity and a living relationship between the four poems before us, and the first effort of 1842 as a fifth, which, though some considerable part of their contents would necessarily rank as episode, establishes the first and most essential condition of their cohesion.  The achievement of Vivien bears directly on the state of Arthur by withdrawing his chief councillor—­the brain, as Lancelot was the right arm, of his court; the love of Elaine is directly associated with the final catastrophe of the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere.  Enid lies somewhat further off the path, nor is it for profane feet to intrude into the sanctuary, for reviewers to advise poets in these high matters; but while we presume nothing, we do not despair of seeing Mr. Tennyson achieve on the basis he has chosen the structure of a full-formed epic.