express the wonder with which we silently look upon the final picture! If the impressions of a thousand differently constituted minds could be recorded after surveying the marvellous portraiture, each set of impressions would prove different, yet every mind, if capable of being moved at all, would have been stirred to its depths. By the very freedom which is accorded to the impressions of the individual beholder, imagination is laid under a spell which will make it work in all climes and countries forever.

Dante and Spenser belong to the class of imaginative delineators perhaps as obviously as any poets of the whole past. Mr. Macaulay has contrasted Milton and Dante on essentially the same grounds as those on which we are at present dividing poets into two classes. The poet of Florence, whose face we see in his portraits, staring on there, as if, with unblenching earnestness, it would look through the very sky, seems to have disdained the ministry of the imagination of his fellows. Cold, stern, determined, he graved, with a pen of iron, to the last line, and then left his writing in the rock forever. Spenser is equally minute, but there is no sternness in Spenser. Dante finishes, because his proud austerity will leave no touch to be added by any other finger, because he scorns toil and pain, and yearns after hard actual truth. Spenser finishes because he loves, or because his genial all-embracing humor makes him never tire of any figure, however grotesque or monstrous, which he has once evoked. He will not lose one of the smiles of Una. He loves every tree of the forest, and gives you the name of each. If he stands on a heavenkissing hill, he is so enraptured with the beauty of earth and heaven, that he must needs tell you of every cloud in the sky and every flower in the meadow. Even when he yokes unsightly creatures in hideous cars, he does not get

angry with them: he looks and lingers, and describes, laughing, perhaps, a quiet laugh.

Shakspeare will afford, wherever we choose to open, admirable examples of both our forms of imaginative exertion.

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!"

These words of Lear are a magnificent example of the imagination that awakens and stimulates. There is nothing of kingly dignity, of imposing presence, of majesty to awe, and power to terrify, which you cannot associate with that line and a half. The description of Dover Cliff, almost immediately preceding, is a specimen, though not so pure, in the other kind. The suggestive imagination insinuates its voice in a whisper; but the closeness of detail is sufficient for illustration.

"How fearful

And dizzy 't is, to cast one's eyes so low!

The crows, and choughs, that wing the midway air,
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade !
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yon tall anchoring bark,
Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high :— I'll look no more
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong."

Of all the poets of the commencement of this century, John Keats exhibited, most distinctively and with the

greatest success, the second form of imaginative description. His intimacy with Leigh Hunt perhaps influenced him to adopt this style. The Story of Rimini by the former is a very fine specimen of rich, warm, detailed coloring. But The Eve of St. Agnes not merely casts the work of Hunt into utter eclipse but is one of the very finest examples of the style in existence. The opening stanza at once reveals imagination in her lingering, loving, particularizing mood.

"St. Agnes' Eve

Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,

And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

Numb were the Beadsman's fingers while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,

Like pious incense from a censer old,

Seem'd taking flight for heaven without a death,

Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith."

But I need not scruple to quote once more the most wonderful passage in this wonderful poem, a passage which perhaps no poet but Keats could ever have written, which in the closeness of its detail is a perfectly distinctive example of the delineative imagination, and which, in the perfect loveliness of every tint, exhibits how rich a poetic effect can be produced by the imagination that so works.

"A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
All garlanded with carven imageries

Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,

And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,

Save wings, for heaven :- Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half hidden, like a mermaid in sea weed,
Pensive a while she dreams awake, and sees,

In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,

But does not look behind or all the charm is fled."

I must repeat that no poet of great genius belongs exclusively to either of the classes I have endeavored to discriminate. The general manner is, in The Eve of St. Agnes, unmistakeably marked: yet there might be cited from its stanzas example after example of those far-illumining words and burning metaphors, which belong specially to the first kind of imaginative action. In turning to Tennyson, we must not expect a uniformity not to be found elsewhere, and perhaps inconsistent with powerful genius. But the order of his imagination is marked with a distinctness not admitting of doubt. It delights in detail, delineation, finish. Herein is found the key to a critical appreciation of the poet; the point of view from which, surveying all he has done, his true station among

masters in the same kind may be discovered. Broad as are the flashes of light which he casts at times across his page, exhaustless as is the suggestion which lurks in many of his metaphors, belonging as some of his entire poems do to the other class, it is side by side with Dante, Spenser, and Keats that he takes his stand. It was just about the time when his poetical genius was first growing into consciousness of its might, and in all probability looking earnestly for any aids, in the way of model or advice, to help its expansion, that Great Britain was awaking to a sense of the loss sustained in the death of Keats, and when that criticism, which had killed by its loud and indiscriminate censure, was hasting to mock by its loud and indiscriminate applause. I cannot but think, therefore, that Tennyson must have devoted to the works of Keats a close, deliberate, and emulous attention; nor do I know a better introduction to the poetry of the former than a familiar acquaintance with that of the latter. One might shrink from the comparison of Tennyson with the three great poets with whom I have classed him. My idea of his poetry, as an abstract of the perfections of other schools wrapped in the light of a new idealization, tends to repel even the suggestion of such a comparison. But I do not hesitate to say that in the works of our great living poet, there are traces of the supreme excellences of Dante, of Keats, and Spenser the austere grandeur and painful finish of the Florentine, the classic taste and intellectual strength exhibited in Hyperion, and the mellowed splendor, the golden glow, the lavish opulence, of Spenser.

A glance, however cursory, at certain of the poems of Tennyson, is sufficient to prove and illustrate the preceding

statements.

The Recollections of the Arabian Nights, one of the