“that good old angler, now with God,” Thomas Todd Stoddart, and so “the long and listless boy” found it to be. It is no wonder that the mother was “_slowly_ brought to yield consent to my desire.” The domestic affections, in fact, do not adapt themselves so well to poetry as the passion, unique in Tennyson, of _Fatima_. The critics who hunt for parallels or plagiarisms will note— “O Love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul thro’ My lips,” and will observe Mr Browning’s “Once he kissed My soul out in a fiery mist.” As to _Œnone_, the scenery of that earliest of the classical idylls is borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallam. “It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie’s _Judgment of Paris_,” says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which “Quintus Calaber Somewhat lazily handled of old” may have reached Tennyson’s mind from an older writer than Beattie. He is at least as likely to have been familiar with Greek myth as with the lamented “Minstrel.” The form of 1833, greatly altered in 1842, contained such unlucky phrases as “cedar shadowy,” and “snowycoloured,” “marblecold,” “violet-eyed”—easy spoils of criticism. The alterations which converted a beautiful but faulty into a beautiful and flawless poem perhaps obscure the significance of Œnone’s “I will not die alone,” which in the earlier volume directly refers to the foreseen end of all as narrated in Tennyson’s late piece, _The Death of Œnone_. The whole poem brings to mind the glowing hues of Titian and the famous Homeric lines on the divine wedlock of Zeus and Hera. The allegory or moral of _The Palace of Art_ does not need explanation. Not many of the poems owe more to revision. The early stanza about Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, and “Eastern Confutzee,” did undeniably remind the reader, as Lockhart said, of _The Groves of Blarney_. “With statues gracing that noble place in, All haythen goddesses most rare, Petrarch, Plato, and Nebuchadnezzar, All standing naked in the open air.” In the early version the Soul, being too much “up to date,” “Lit white streams of dazzling gas,” like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford. “Thus her intense, untold delight, In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound, Was flattered day and night.” Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter’s experiments in gas, the “smell” gave him no “deep, untold delight,” and his “infamous review” was biassed by these circumstances.