prize of beauty to the fairest of the goddesses, and indeed the shepherd seemed properly qualified to decide so great a contest, as his wisdom was so well established, and his prudence and sagacity so well known.  The goddesses appeared before their judge without any covering or ornament, and each tried by promises and entreaties to gain the attention of Paris, and to influence his judgment.  Juno promised him a kingdom; Minerva, military glory; and Venus, the fairest woman in the world for his wife.”  (Lempriere.) Paris accorded the apple to Aphrodite, abandoned Oenone, and after he had been acknowledged the son of Priam went to Sparta, where he persuaded Helen, the wife of Menelaus, to flee with him to Troy.  The ten years’ siege, and the destruction of Troy, resulted from this rash act.  Oenone’s significant words at the close of the poem foreshadow this disaster.  Tennyson, in his old age concluded the narrative in the poem called The Death of Oenone.  According to the legend Paris, mortally wounded by one of the arrows of Philoctetes, sought out the abandoned Oenone that she might heal him of his wound.  But he died before he reached her, “and the nymph, still mindful of their former loves, threw herself upon his body, and stabbed herself to the heart, after she had plentifully bathed it with her tears.”  Tennyson follows another tradition in which Paris reaches Oenone, who scornfully repels him.  He passed onward through the mist, and dropped dead upon the mountain side.  His old shepherd playmates built his funeral pyre.  Oenone follows the yearning in her heart to where her husband lies, and dies in the flames that consume him.

In Chapter IV of Mr. Stopford Brooke’s Tennyson, there is a valuable commentary upon Oenone.  He deals first with the imaginative treatment of the landscape, which is characteristic of all Tennyson’s classical poems, and instances the remarkable improvement effected in the descriptive passages in the volume of 1842.  “But fine landscape and fine figure re-drawing are not enough to make a fine poem.  Human interest, human passion, must be greater than Nature, and dominate the subject.  Indeed, all this lovely scenery is nothing in comparison with the sorrow and love of Oenone, recalling her lost love in the places where once she lived in joy.  This is the main humanity of the poem.  But there is more.  Her common sorrow is lifted almost into the proportions of Greek tragedy by its cause and by its results.  It is caused by a quarrel in Olympus, and the mountain nymph is sacrificed without a thought to the vanity of the careless gods.  That is an ever-recurring tragedy in human history.  Moreover, the personal tragedy deepens when we see the fateful dread in Oenone’s heart that she will, far away, in time hold her lover’s life in her hands, and refuse to give it back to him—­a fatality that Tennyson treated before he died.  And, secondly, Oenone’s sorrow is lifted into dignity by the vast results which flowed from its cause.  Behind it were the mighty fates of Troy, the ten years’ battle, the anger of Achilles, the wanderings of Ulysses, the tragedy of Agamemnon, the founding of Rome, and the three great epics of the ancient world.”