their freedom from any self-conscious attempt at reflective epithets
or figures, runs through them all. We are never jarred in them, as
we are in all the attempts at ballad-writing and ballad-restoring
before Mr. Tennyson's time, by discordant touches of the reflective
in thought, the picturesque in Nature, or the theatric in action. To
illustrate our meaning, readers may remember the ballad of "Fair
Emmeline," in Bishop Percy's "Reliques." The bishop confesses, if we
mistake not, to have patched one end of the ballad. He need not have
informed us of that fact, while such lines as these following meet
our eyes:

The Baron turned aside,
And wiped away the rising tears
He proudly strove to hide.

No old ballad writer would have used such a complicated concetto.
Another, and even a worse instance is to be found in the difference
between the old and new versions of the grand ballad of "Glasgerion."
In the original, we hear how the elfin harper could

Harp fish out of the water,
And water out of a stone,
And milk out of a maiden's breast
That bairn had never none.

For which some benighted "restorer" substitutes--

Oh, there was magic in his touch,
And sorcery in his string!

No doubt there was. But while the new poetaster informs you of the
abstract notion, the ancient poet gives you the concrete fact; as Mr.
Tennyson has done with wonderful art in his exquisite "St. Agnes,"
where the saint's subjective mysticism appears only as embodied in
objective pictures:

Break up the heavens, oh Lord! and far
Through all yon starlight keen
Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star,
In raiment white and clean.

Sir Walter Scott's ballads fail just on the same point. Even
Campbell cannot avoid an occasional false note of sentiment. In Mr.
Tennyson alone, as we think, the spirit of the Middle Age is
perfectly reflected; its delight, not in the "sublime and
picturesque," but in the green leaves and spring flowers for their
own sake--the spirit of Chaucer and of the "Robin Hood Garland"--the
naturalism which revels as much in the hedgerow and garden as in
Alps, and cataracts, and Italian skies, and the other strong
stimulants to the faculty of admiration which the palled taste of an
unhealthy age, from Keats and Byron down to Browning, has rushed
abroad to seek. It is enough for Mr. Tennyson's truly English spirit
to see how

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley