flinty heart indeed that can reach the end of Dora unmoved. The pathos is like that of the simple stories of the old Hebrew Bible, the story of Joseph or the story of Ruth. These move and fascinate us in childhood, and the longer we live the more do we love them.

There is exquisitely fine character-painting in the treatment, slight as it looks, of the two women, Dora and Mary. They are not only sharply defined in their individualities, but are types of great contrasted orders among women. Dora is the superior nature, the deeper, the more thoughtful, the more self-sacrificing, of the two; incapable of coming short in any duty owed either to herself, or to her benefactor, or to the man she loves; capable of forgiving even the deadliest offence that can be offered to woman, the injuria spreta forma, the contemptuous disparagement of her beauty, and rejection of her love. Yet we feel that she has her womanly pride, too, and that, if one glance of her eye could enchain William and make her a happy bride, she would not cast it. When her uncle, enraged that his son had married Mary in defiance of him, ordered her not to speak to William or his wife, she "promised being meek," thinking that the old man would require only to be humoured for a while. 'It cannot be," she said to herself; "my uncle's mind will change." But when troubles overtook William, and he passed his father's door day by day heartbroken, then

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Dora stored what little she could save,

And sent it them by stealth, nor did they know

Who sent it; till at last a fever seized

On William, and in harvest-time he died.

Dora will now obey her uncle no longer. There had been nothing of superstition or slavishness in her obedience, because she felt sure it would be temporary; but she is quick to blame herself, feeling that it was wrong to countenance even so far the old man's unrighteous anger.

Dora and Mary.

Then Dora went to Mary. Mary sat

And look'd with tears upon her boy, and thought
Hard things of Dora. Dora came and said:

"I have obey'd my uncle until now,
And I have sinn'd, for it was all thro' me
This evil came on William at the first.
But, Mary, for the sake of him that's gone,
And for your sake, the woman that he chose,
And for this orphan, I am come to you:

You know there has not been for these five years
So full a harvest let me take the boy,

And I will set him in my uncle's eye

Among the wheat; that when his heart is glad
Of the full harvest, he may see the boy,
And bless him for the sake of him that's gone."

The first day the farmer did the child; on the second he sharply, but took the boy.

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not see her as she sat with noticed her, rebuked her

"I see it is a trick

Got up betwixt you and the woman there.
I must be taught my duty, and by you!
You knew my word was law, and yet you dared
To slight it. Well-for I will take the boy;
But you go hence, and never see me more."

Dora, meekly acquiescent, does not utter one remonstrant word, but at the same time makes no apology for having done what she knows to be right. After weeping in secret, she returns to Mary, and asks to be allowed to live and work with her. But the comparatively commonplace, yet alert and ready-witted Mary, armed with the instinctive wisdom of maternity, has now the advantage. A touch of sacred anger thrills her, and she rebels against the hard old man.

"This shall never be,

That thou shouldst take my trouble on thyself:
And now, I think, he shall not have the boy,
For he will teach him hardness, and to slight
His mother; therefore, thou and I will go,
And I will have my boy, and bring him home;
And I will beg of him to take thee back:

But if he will not take thee back again,
Then thou and I will live within one house,
And work for William's child, until he grows

Of age to help us."

This is obviously right, as well as brave and womanly. They set out for the farm. Mary's courage does not fail. She appeals to her father-in-law to take Dora back, and tells him that William died confessing that, though he could not rue marrying Mary, he had done wrong to cross his father, and had prayed God to bless him.

So Mary said, and Dora hid her face

By Mary. There was silence in the room;

And all at once the old man burst in sobs :

"I have been to blame-to blame. I have kill'd my son.

I have kill'd him-but I loved him-my dear son.

May God forgive me!-I have been to blame.

Kiss me, my children."

Then they clung about

The old man's neck, and kiss'd him many times.

And all the man was broken with remorse;

And all his love came back a hundred-fold;

And for three hours he sobb'd o'er William's child
Thinking of William.

So these four abode
Within one house together; and as years
Went forward, Mary took another mate;
But Dora lived unmarried till her death.

The piece would have been utterly ruined if there had been another fate than this for Dora. Had she been married, a perfect poem would have become a trivial novelette. The blunder would have been far worse than making Dinah Morris end her life suckling fools and chronicling small beer, a desecration of the Methodist Saint Theresa for which I have never been able to stifle a little bit of grudge against George Eliot. Marriages, however, are the natural climaxes, the final ends of novels, and no dénouement could be more in accordance with rule than marriage between the hero and the heroine, especially when the hero was Adam Bede.

Tennyson was under no such temptation to let Dora be absorbed into the mass of commonplace humanity.

Poor Esther Johnson said of Swift that he could write beautifully on a broomstick; but even a broomstick, if one were permitted to wander in thought to the woods in which it grew, might seem a likelier subject for poetry than the pecuniary loss of a city clerk, on which Tennyson has contrived to hang a powerful and beautiful poem in Sea Dreams. A city clerk is the hero, his wife, an unknown artist's orphan child, is the heroine; their child Margaret is the personage of next importance in the story; and the list of characters is completed by a speculator in mines, whose representations had induced the clerk to risk his money.

One babe was theirs, a Margaret, three years old:
They, thinking that her clear germander eye
Droopt in the giant-factoried city-gloom,

Came, with a month's leave given them, to the sea.

The "germander" eye! Some might call this a touch of Preraphaelite conceit or affectation, but I think a poet has a right to invent colour-words for himself when he wants them, provided only that they are expressive, picturesque, and not too far-fetched. There is no word in the language that will define the particular tint of blue which you see not unfrequently in the eye of an ailing child so well as that which is here applied by Tennyson. It is the faintly mottled blue of the germander speedwell-nothing else. As the little flower can be seen in summer in every English lane, the reference to it can hardly be called far-fetched.

Reaching the sea-coast, "all sand and cliff, and deep-inrunning cave," on a Saturday, the clerk and his wife went to chapel next morning and, after sermon,

Forth they came and paced the shore,
Ran in and out the long sea-framing caves,
Drank the large air, and saw, but scarce believed
(The sootflake of so many a summer still
Clung to their fancies) that they saw, the sea.

So now on sand they walked, and now on cliff,
Lingering about the thymy promontories,

Till all the sails were darkened in the west,

And rosed in the east.

There is another reading, fresh and bright, from nature's own page! You stand by the sea, on a southward-looking coast, as the sun goes down. Westwards, where the sails come between you and the sunset, they show simply as spots of shade; eastward, where they are farther from the sun than you, they catch the gleam from the west, and every sail is a speck of rose-light. I call that a proper illustration of what the versifier says of our Alfred's "truth of touch."

After these experiences the pair went "homeward and to bed." The wife, who in her Christian tenderness was stronger than her husband, urges him to forgive the man whose "unctuous mouth" had lured him to buy the Peruvian mine shares, and lose the savings of twelve long years. He replies:

"Forgive! How many will say, 'forgive,' and find

A sort of absolution in the sound

To hate a little longer! No; the sin

That neither God nor man can well forgive,

Hypocrisy, I saw it in him at once."

He gives his wife an account of his last meeting with the man who had injured him.

"My dearest friend,

Have faith, have faith! We live by faith,' said he;

'And all things work together for the good

Of those '-it makes me sick to quote him-last
Gript my hand hard, and with God-bless-you' went.
I stood like one that had received a blow:
I found a hard friend in his loose accounts,

A loose one in the hard grip of his hand,
A curse in his God-bless-you: then my eyes
Pursued him down the street, and far away,
Amongst the honest shoulders of the crowd,
Read rascal in the motions of his back,
And scoundrel in the supple-sliding knee."

Still the woman pleads. She will not grant that the