aly face' of the miller, or 'the moon in an ivy-tod;' and we think
our readers will be delighted at the way in which the impassioned
husband relates to his wife how his fancy mingled enthusiasm for rural
sights and sounds, with a prospect of the less romantic scene of her
father's occupation.

'How dear to me in youth, my love,
Was everything about the mill;
The black, the silent pool above,
The pool beneath that ne'er stood still;

The meal-sacks on the whitened floor,
The dark round of the dripping wheel,
_The very air about the door,
Made misty with the floating meal!_'--p. 36.

The accumulation of tender images in the following lines appears not
less wonderful:--

'Remember you that pleasant day
When, after roving in the woods,
('Twas April then) I came and lay
Beneath those _gummy_ chestnut-buds?

'A water-rat from off the bank
Plunged in the stream. With idle care,
Downlooking through the sedges rank,
I saw your troubled image there.

'If you remember, you had set,
Upon the narrow casement-edge,
A _long green box_ of mignonette
And you were leaning on the ledge.'

The poet's truth to Nature in his 'gummy' chestnut-buds, and to Art in
the 'long green box' of mignonette--and that masterful touch of likening
the first intrusion of love into the virgin bosom of the Miller's
daughter to the plunging of a water-rat into the mill-dam--these are
beauties which, we do not fear to say, equal anything even in Keats.

We pass by several songs, sonnets, and small pieces, all of singular
merit, to arrive at a class, we may call them, of three poems derived
from mythological sources--Oenone, the Hesperides, and the
Lotos-eaters. But though the subjects are derived from classical
antiquity, Mr. Tennyson treats them with so much originality that he
makes them exclusively his own. Oenone, deserted by

'Beautiful Paris, evilhearted Paris,'

sings a kind of dying soliloquy addressed to Mount Ida, in a formula
which is _sixteen_ times repeated in this short poem.

'Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.'

She tells her 'dear mother Ida,' that when evilhearted Paris was about
to judge between the three goddesses, he hid her (Oenone) behind a
rock, whence she had a full view of the _naked_ beauties of the rivals,
which broke her heart.

'_Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die_:--
It was the deep mid noon: