bitual and
characteristic action. A knight is described '_lance in rest_'--a
dragoon, '_sword in hand_'--so, as the idea of the Virgin is inseparably
connected with her child, Mr. Tennyson reverently describes her
conventional position--'_babe in arm_.'

His gallery of illustrious portraits is thus admirably arranged:--The
Madonna--Ganymede--St. Cecilia--Europa--Deep-haired
Milton--Shakspeare--Grim Dante--Michael Angelo--Luther--Lord
Bacon--Cervantes--Calderon--King David--'the Halicarnassean' (_quaere_,
which of them?)--Alfred, (not Alfred Tennyson, though no doubt in any
other man's gallery _he_ would have a place) and finally--

'Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel,
Swarth Moses by the Coptic sea,
Plato, _Petrarca_, Livy, and Raphael,
And eastern Confutzee!'

We can hardly suspect the very original mind of Mr. Tennyson to have
harboured any recollections of that celebrated Doric idyll, 'The groves
of Blarney,' but certainly there is a strong likeness between Mr.
Tennyson's list of pictures and the Blarney collection of statutes--

'Statues growing that noble place in,
All heathen goddesses most rare,
Homer, Plutarch, and Nebuchadnezzar,
All standing naked in the open air!'

In this poem we first observed a stroke of art (repeated afterwards)
which we think very ingenious. No one who has ever written verse but
must have felt the pain of erasing some happy line, some striking
stanza, which, however excellent in itself, did not exactly suit the
place for which it was destined. How curiously does an author mould and
remould the plastic verse in order to fit in the favourite thought; and
when he finds that he cannot introduce it, as Corporal Trim says, _any
how_, with what reluctance does he at last reject the intractable, but
still cherished offspring of his brain! Mr. Tennyson manages this
delicate matter in a new and better way; he says, with great candour and
simplicity, 'If this poem were not already too long, _I should have
added_ the following stanzas,' and _then he adds them_, (p. 84;)--or,
'the following lines are manifestly superfluous, as a part of the text,
but they may be allowed to stand as a separate poem,' (p. 121,) _which
they do_;--or, 'I intended to have added something on statuary, but I
found it very difficult;'--(he had, moreover, as we have seen, been
anticipated in this line by the Blarney poet)--'but I have finished the
statues of _Elijah_ and _Olympias_--ju