‘And merge,’ he said, ’in form and loss
    The picturesque of man and man.’ 
    We talk’d:  the stream beneath us ran,
  The wine-flask lying couch’d in moss,

  Or cool’d within the glooming wave;
    And last, returning from afar,
    Before the crimson-circled star
  Had fallen into her father’s grave.

  And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
    We heard behind the woodbine vail
    The milk that bubbled in the pail,
  And buzzings of the honeyed hours.

“The volume is pervaded by a religious feeling, and an ardent aspiration for the advancement of society,—­as may be gathered from our first quotation.  These two sentiments impart elevation, faith, and resignation; so that memory, thought, and a chastened tenderness, generally predominate over deep grief.  The grave character of the theme forbids much indulgence in conceits such as Tennyson sometimes falls into, and the execution is more finished than his volumes always are:  there are very few prosaic lines, and few instances of that excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish.  The nature of the plan—­which, after all, is substantially though not in form a set of sonnets on a single theme—­is favorable to those pictures of common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial feeling and a perception of the lurking beautiful, which are the author’s distinguishing characteristic.  The scheme, too, enables him appropriately to indulge in theological and metaphysical reflections; where he is not quite so excellent.  Many of the pieces taken singly are happy examples of Tennyson, though not perhaps the very happiest.  As a whole, there is inevitably something of sameness in the work, and the subject is unequal to its long expansion; yet its nature is such, there is so much of looseness in the plan, that it might have been doubled or trebled without incongruity.  It is one of those books which depend upon individual will and feeling, rather than upon a broad subject founded in nature and tractable by the largest laws of art.  Hence, though not irrespective of laws, such works depend upon instinctive felicity—­felicity in the choice of topics and the mode of execution, felicity both in doing and in leaving undone:  this high and perfect excellence, perhaps, In Memoriam has not reached, though omission and revision might lead very close to it.”

[Footnote 1:  In Memoriam.  By Alfred Tennyson. 1 vol. 12mo.  Boston:  Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1850.]

* * * * *

Etherization.—­A writer in the Medical Times says, “The day, perhaps, may not be far off, when we shall be able to suspend the sensibility of the nervous chords, without acting on the center of the nervous system, just as we are enabled to suspend circulation in an artery without acting on the heart.”

* * * * *

Leigh Hunt.