the true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of weighty and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry.  In general, Tennyson’s art is unclassical.  It is rich, ornate, composite; not statuesque so much as picturesque.  He is a great painter, and the critics complain that in passages calling for movement and action—­a battle, a tournament, or the like—­his figures stand still as in a tableau; and they contrast such passages unfavorably with scenes of the same kind in Scott, and with Browning’s spirited ballad, How we brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.  In the Palace of Art these elaborate pictorial effects were combined with allegory; in the Lotus Eaters, with that expressive treatment of landscape noted in Mariana; the lotus land, “in which it seemed always afternoon,” reflecting and promoting the enchanted indolence of the heroes.  Two of the pieces in this 1833 volume, the May Queen and the Miller’s Daughter, were Tennyson’s first poems of the affections, and as ballads of simple rustic life they anticipated his more perfect idyls in blank verse, such as Dora, the Brook, Edwin Morris, and the Gardener’s Daughter. The songs in the Miller’s Daughter had a more spontaneous lyrical movement than any thing he had yet published, and foretokened the lovely songs which interlude the divisions of the Princess, the famous Bugle Song, the no-less famous Cradle Song, and the rest.  In 1833 Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam, died, and the effect of this great sorrow upon the poet was to deepen and strengthen the character of his genius.  It turned his mind in upon itself, and set it brooding over questions which his poetry had so far left untouched; the meaning of life and death, the uses of adversity, the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, and the dealings of God with mankind.

  Thou madest Death:  and, lo, thy foot
  Is on the skull which thou hast made.

His elegy on Hallam, In Memoriam, was not published till 1850.  He kept it by him all those years, adding section after section, gathering up into it whatever reflections crystallized about its central theme.  It is his most intellectual and most individual work; a great song of sorrow and consolation.  In 1842 he published a third collection of poems, among which were Locksley Hall, displaying a new strength, of passion; Ulysses, suggested by a passage in Dante:  pieces of a speculative cast, like the Two Voices and the Vision of Sin; the song Break, Break, Break, which preluded In Memoriam; and, lastly, some additional gropings toward the subject of the Arthurian romance, such as Sir Galahad, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, and Morte d’ Arthur. The last was in blank verse, and, as afterward incorporated in the Passing of Arthur, forms one of the best passages in the Idylls of the King.  The Princess,