_The Lady of Shalott_, even in its early form, was more than enough to give assurance of a poet. In effect it is even more poetical, in a mysterious way, if infinitely less human, than the later treatment of the same or a similar legend in _Elaine_. It has the charm of Coleridge, and an allegory of the fatal escape from the world of dreams and shadows into that of realities may have been really present to the mind of the young poet, aware that he was “living in phantasy.” The alterations are usually for the better. The daffodil is not an aquatic plant, as the poet seems to assert in the first form— “The yellow-leavèd water-lily, The green sheathed daffodilly, Tremble in the water chilly, Round about Shalott.” Nobody can prefer to keep “Though the squally east wind keenly Blew, with folded arms serenely By the water stood the queenly Lady of Shalott.” However stoical the Lady may have been, the reader is too seriously sympathetic with her inevitable discomfort— “All raimented in snowy white That loosely flew,” as she was. The original conclusion was distressing; we were dropped from the airs of mysterious romance:— “They crossed themselves, their stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest; There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest The well-fed wits at Camelot.” Hitherto we have been “puzzled,” but as with the sublime incoherences of a dream. Now we meet well-fed wits, who say, “Bless my stars!” as perhaps we should also have done in the circumstances—a dead lady arriving, in a very cold east wind, alone in a boat, for “her blood was frozen slowly,” as was natural, granting the weather and the lady’s airy costume. It is certainly matter of surprise that the young poet’s vision broke up in this humorous manner. And, after all, it is less surprising that the Scorpion, finding such matter in a new little book by a new young man, was more sensitive to the absurdity than to the romance. But no lover of poetry should have been blind to the almost flawless excellence of _Mariana in the South_, inspired by the landscape of the Provençal tour with Arthur Hallam. In consequence of Lockhart’s censures, or in deference to the maturer taste of the poet, _The Miller’s Daughter_ was greatly altered before 1842. It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of Tennyson’s domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The seventh stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to bring in “minnows” where “fish” had been the reading, and where “trout” would best recall an English chalk stream. To the angler the rising trout, which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as the “reflex of a beauteous form.” “Every woman seems an angel at the water-side,” said