enhanced
and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and
illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who
sells fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes
to sea, is wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his
return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the
subject, and dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and
classical style, this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr.
Tennyson has been able to make it the principal--the largest tale in
his new volume. He has done so only by giving to every event and
incident in the volume an accompanying commentary. He tells a great
deal about the torrid zone which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden
certainly would not have perceived; and he gives to the fishing
village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a
fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality.

The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is thrown,
is an absolute model of adorned art:

The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes,
The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The lustre of the long convolvuluses
That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran
Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world,
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
He could not see, the kindly human face,
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail:
No sail from day to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.

No expressive circumstance can be added to this description, no
enhancing detail suggested. A mu