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For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill,

And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out of the foam,"
That the smoothfaced snubnosed rogue would leap from his counter and till,
And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yardwand, home.

Having thus disposed of the times, Tennyson, with some rhyme, but no reason, thus abruptly introduces Maud:

There are workmen up at the Hall: they are coming back from abroad,
The dark old place will be gilt by the touch of a millionnaire:

I have heard, I know not whence, of the singular beauty of Maud,

I play'd with the girl when a child; she promised then to be fair.

Maud with her venturous climbings and tumbles and childish escapes,
Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall,
Maud with her sweet purse-mouth when my father dangled the
Maud the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling of all,-

grapes,

What is she now? My dreams are bad. She may bring me a curse.
No, there is fatter game on the moor; she will let me alone.

Thanks, for the fiend best knows whether woman or man be the worse.
I will bury myself in my books, and the Devil may pipe to his own.

At length Maud arrives at the village, and the hero being "round the corner" along with all the bumpkins, catches a glimpse of her "sensitive nose," and going home he thus pours out his feelings:

:

Long have I sigh'd for a calm: God grant I may find it at last!
It will never be broken by Maud, she has neither savour nor salt,
But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past,
Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault?
All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen)
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,

Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, if it had not been
For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour's defect of the rose,

Or an underlip, you may call it a little too ripe, too full,

Or the least little delicate aquiline curve in a sensitive nose,

From which I escaped heart-free, with the least little touch of spleen.

The "sensitive nose" appears to have acted upon the mind of the lover with an "Unfortunate Miss Bailey, Giles Scroggins, and Ghost of a Grim Serag of Mutton, combined power, and Tennyson, thus, not forgetting his never failing "Orion describes his restless condition:

Cold and clear cut face, why come you so cruelly meck,
Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown'd,
Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on the cheek,
Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound;
Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong
Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before
Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound,
Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long
Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more,
But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground,
Listening now to the tide in its broad flung ship-wrecking roar,
Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave,
Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found
The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave.

He meets Maud "as she rode by on the moor;" she flushes

with pride at his salutation, and having told himself that she

is a "milk white fawn," and "all unmeet for a wife," that she haswandered about at her will," he adds, prettily"You have but fed on the roses, and lain in the lilies of life."

Let the reader bear in mind that these lines above quoted are from the pen of Alfred Tennyson: the man of all others in these Kingdoms from whom one might expect taste and feeling. Who could believe that the writer of The Miller's Daughter was able to indite this nonsense. We have heard Tennyson called thoughtful and philosophic, like Wordsworth; fanciful as Coleridge; pathetic, yet strong, as Crabbe. But is this like Wordsworth, or Coleridge, or Crabbe?

Maud's brother appears to have excited the lover's anger; Sim writes;

"That dandy-despot, he,

That jewell'd mass of millinery,
That oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull,
Smelling of musk and of insolence,
Her brother."

Tappertit is found trespassing by the brother, and angry at being so discovered, he thus describes him, and he reminds us of a saying of Charles Lamb--we paint our enemies so unflatteringly that no body knows them. There is a curious. problem in obstetrics and physiology suggested towards the end of this extract, in which it is stated that Maud is "only the child of her mother."

Scorn'd, to be scorn'd by one that I scorn,
Is that a matter to make me fret?

That a calamity hard to be borne?
Well, he may live to hate me yet.
Fool that I am to be vext with his pride!
I past him, I was crossing his lands;
He stood on the path a little aside;
His face, as I grant, in spite of spite,
Has a broad-blown comeliness, red and
white,

And six feet two, as I think, he stands;
But his essences turn'd the live air sick,
And barbarous opulence jewel-thick
Sunn d itself on his breast and his hands.

Who shall call me ungentle, unfair,
I long'd so earnestly then and there
To give him the grasp of fellowship;
But while I past he was humming an air,
Stopt, and then with a riding whip
Leisurely tapping a glossy boot,
And curving a contumelious lip,
Gorgonised me from head to foot
With a stony British stare.

Why sits he here in his father's chair?
That old man never comes to his place:
Shall I believe him ashamed to be seen?
For only once, in the village street,
Last year, I caught a glimpse of his face,
A gray old wolf and a lean.

Scarcely, now, would I call him a cheat;
For then, perhaps, as a child of deceit,
She might by a true descent be untrue;
And Maud is as true as Maud is sweet:
Tho' I fancy her sweetness only due
To the sweeter blood by the other side;
Her mother has been a thing complete,
However she came to be so allied.
And fair without, faithful within,
Maud to him is nothing akin :
Some peculiar mystic grace

Made her only the child of her mother,

And heap'd the whole inherited sin
On that huge scapegoat of the race,
All, all upon the brother.

Far upon a lonely moor he sees his mistress ride, and by her side her brother and a

new made lord, splendour plucks

The slavish hat from the villager's head."

It seems that this new made lord was the grandson of an owner of coal mines, who had lately died,

"Gone to a blacker pit, for whom

Grimy nakedness dragging his trucks
And laying his trams in a poison d gloom,
Wrought, till he crept from a gutted mine,
Master of half a servile shire.'

The maiden, however, is not to be won by the "new made lord;" she loves Tennyson, or Tappertit, or whatever the reader pleases to call him, and thus he sings; and sings very prettily too; the lines in italics, in the sixth stanza, are, as Tennyson's verses often are, like, too like, Herrick :

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We do not admire this "little King Charles is snarling" and darling" it jars upon the ear, and reminds us of Sam Lover's Molly Bawn, and

"The wicked watch-dog near is snarlin',

He takes me for a thief you see,

For he knows I'd steal you Molly darlin'
An' thin thransported I should be."

A grand political dinner,

A dinner and then a dance,"

are to be given to "the men of many acres," and "the maids and marriage makers," by the brother of Maud, his father being now dead; but Tappertit will not go, not being asked, as he tells us, but he does not mind it, bless you; he prefers hanging about Maud's "rose-garden," knowing that she will come to him-"Love among the roses-" when she has got rid of the company. Here, however, we have a bit of the real Tennyson poetry, with not the least touch of poor Sim Tappertit. The following beautiful lines are an invocation to Maud, entreating

her to come to her lover in the " rose garden," and there is a passion and tenderness about them almost sufficient to redeem that shocking.

"Oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull, Smelling of musk and of insolence,"

to which we have already referred. The lines are as follow:

Come into the garden, Maud,

For the black bat, night, has flown,

Come into the garden, Maud,

I am here at the gate alone;

And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the roses blown.

For a breeze of morning moves,

And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves

On a bed of daffodil sky,

To faint in the light of the sun she loves,
To faint in his light, and to die.

All night have the roses heard

The flute, violin, bassoon;

All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd
To the dancers dancing in tune;
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,

And a hush with the setting moon.

I said to the lily, There is but one

With whom she has heart to be gay.
When will the dancers leave her alone?
She is weary of dance and play.'
Now half to the setting moon are gone,
And half to the rising day;
Low on the sand and loud on the stone
The last wheel echoes away.

I said to the rose, 'The brief night goes
In babble and revel and wine.

O young lord-lover, what sighs are those,
For one that will never be thine?
But mine, but mine,' so I sware to the rose,
For ever and ever, mine.'

And the soul of the rose went into my blood,
As the music clash'd in the hall;

And long by the garden lake I stood,
For I heard your rivulet fall

From the lake to the meadow and on to

the wood,

Our wood, that is dearer than all;

From the meadow your walks have left so sweet

That whenever a March-wind sighs He sets the jewel-print of your feet

In violets blue as your eyes,

To the woody hollows in which we meet
And the valleys of Paradise.

The slender acacia would not shake

One long milk-bloom on the tree; The white lake blossom fell into the lake, As the pimpernel dozed on the lea; But the rose was awake all night for your sake,

Knowing your promise to me; The lilies and roses were all awake,

They sigh'd for the dawn and thee.

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,
Come hither, the dances are done,
In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,
Queen lily and rose in one;
Shine out, little head, sunning over with
curls,

To the flowers, and be their sun.

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries, She is near, she is near;" And the white rose weeps, 'She is late;' The larkspur listens, I hear, I hear;' And the lily whispers, I wait.'

She is coming, my own, my sweet;

Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat,

Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.

Maud comes forth to meet her lover: her brother and the "new made lord" surprise them, and the tale of sorrow and blood is thus told :

The fault was mine, the fault was mine

Why am I sitting here so stunn'd and still,

Plucking the harmless wild-flower on the hill ?—

It is this guilty hand!

And there rises ever a passionate cry

From underneath in the darkening land

What is it, that has been done?

O dawn of Eden bright over earth and sky,

The fires of Hell brake out of thy rising sun,

The fires of Hell and of Hate;

For she, sweet soul, had hardly spoken a word,

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When her brother ran in his rage to the gate,
He came with the babe-faced lord;

Heap'd on her terms of disgrace,

And while she wept, and I strove to be cool,
He fiercely gave me the lie,

Till I with as fierce an anger spoke,

And he struck me, madman, over the face,
Struck me before the languid fool,

Who was gaping and grinning by:
Struck for himself an evil stroke;

Wrought for his house an irredeemable woe;

For front to front in an hour we stood,

And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke
From the red-ribb'd hollow behind the wood.

And thunder'd up into Heaven the Christless code,
That must have life for a blow.

Ever and ever afresh they seem'd to grow.
Was it he lay there with a fading eye?

The fault was mine,' he whisper'd, 'fly!'

Then glided out of the joyous wood

The ghastly Wraith of one that I know;

And there rang on a sudden a passionate cry,

A cry for a brother's blood:

It will ring in my heart and my ears, till I die, till I die.

Is it gone? my pulses beat

What was it? a lying trick of the brain?

Yet I thought I saw her stand,

A shadow there at my feet,

High over the shadowy land.

It is gone; and the heavens fall in a gentle rain,

When they should burst and drown with deluging storms

The feeble vassals of wine and anger and lust,

The little hearts that know not how to forgive:

Arise, my God, and strike, for we hold Thee just,
Strike dead the whole weak race of venemous worms,
That sting each other here in the dust;
We are not worthy to live.

Far away to foreign lands flies the lover, and never more in life knows he rest or joy. Racked in conscience; love all hopeless, life objectless; nothing in the future save despair, nothing in the present except bitter memories of the woful past; and yet amidst all his griefs, above every sorrow rises the image of his love, and thus he tells us of his hopes and

fears

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It leads me forth at evening
It lightly winds and steals
In a cold white robe before me,
When all my spirit reels

At the shouts, the leagues of lights,
And the roaring of the wheels.

Half the night I waste in sighs,
Half in dreams I sorrow after
The delight of early skies;
In a wakeful doze I sorrow
For the hand, the lips, the eyes,
For the meeting of the morrow,
The delight of happy laughter,
The delight of low replies.

"Tis a morning pure and sweet,
And a dewy splendour falls
On the little flower that clings
To the turrets and the walls;

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