reer of the over-mastered sage.

* * * * *

Nowhere could we more opportunely than at this point call attention to
Mr. Tennyson's extraordinary felicity and force in the use of metaphor
and simile. This gift appears to have grown with his years, alike in
abundance, truth, and grace. As the showers descend from heaven to
return to it in vapour, so Mr. Tennyson's loving observation of Nature,
and his Muse, seem to have had a compact of reciprocity well kept on
both sides. When he was young, and when "Oenone" was first published, he
almost boasted of putting a particular kind of grasshopper into Troas,
which, as he told us in a note, was probably not to be found there. It
is a small but yet an interesting and significant indication that, when
some years after he retouched the poem, he omitted the note, and
generalised the grasshopper. Whether we are right or not in taking this
for a sign of the movement of his mind, there can be no doubt that his
present use of figures is both the sign and the result of a reverence
for Nature alike active, intelligent, and refined. Sometimes applying
the metaphors of Art to Nature, he more frequently draws the materials
of his analogies from her unexhausted book, and, however often he may
call for some new and beautiful vehicle of illustration, she seems never
to withhold an answer. With regard to this particular and very critical
gift, it seems to us that he may challenge comparison with almost any
poet either of ancient or modern times. We have always been accustomed
to look upon Ariosto as one of the greatest among the masters of the art
of metaphor and simile; and it would be easy to quote from him instances
which in tenderness, grace, force, or all combined, can never be
surpassed. But we have rarely seen the power subjected to a greater
trial than in the passages just quoted from Mr. Tennyson, where metaphor
lies by metaphor as thick as shells upon their bed; yet each
individually with its outline as well drawn, its separateness as clear,
its form as true to nature, and with the most full and harmonious
contribution to the general effect.

* * * * *

Mr. Tennyson practises largely, and with an extraordinary skill and
power, the art of designed and limited repetitions. They bear a
considerable resemblance to those Homeric _formulae_ which have been so
usefully remarked by Colonel Mure--not the formulae of constant
recur