The lyric, “Tears, idle tears,” is far beyond praise: once read it seems like a thing that has always existed in the world of poetic archetypes, and has now been not so much composed as discovered and revealed. The many pictures and similitudes in _The Princess_ have a magical gorgeousness:— “From the illumined hall Long lanes of splendour slanted o’er a press Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes, And rainbow robes, and gems and gem-like eyes, And gold and golden heads; they to and fro Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, some pale.” The “small sweet Idyll” from “A volume of the poets of her land” pure Theocritus. It has been admirably rendered into Greek by Mr Gilbert Murray. The exquisite beauties of style are not less exquisitely blended in the confusions of a dream, for a dream is the thing most akin to _The Princess_. Time does not exist in the realm of Gama, or in the ideal university of Ida. We have a bookless North, severed but by a frontier pillar from a golden and learned South. The arts, from architecture to miniature-painting, are in their highest perfection, while knights still tourney in armour, and the quarrel of two nations is decided as in the gentle and joyous passage of arms at Ashby de la Zouche. Such confusions are purposefully dream-like: the vision being a composite thing, as dreams are, haunted by the modern scene of the holiday in the park, the “gallant glorious chronicle,” the Abbey, and that “old crusading knight austere,” Sir Ralph. The seven narrators of the scheme are like the “split personalities” of dreams, and the whole scheme is of great technical skill. The earlier editions lacked the beautiful songs of the ladies, and that additional trait of dream, the strange trance-like seizures of the Prince: “fallings from us, vanishings,” in Wordsworthian phrase; instances of “dissociation,” in modern psychological terminology. Tennyson himself, like Shelley and Wordsworth, had experience of this kind of dreaming awake which he attributes to his Prince, to strengthen the shadowy yet brilliant character of his romance. It is a thing of normal and natural _points de repère_; of daylight suggestion, touched as with the magnifying and intensifying elements of haschish-begotten phantasmagoria. In the same way opium raised into the region of brilliant vision that passage of Purchas which Coleridge was reading before he dreamed _Kubla Khan_. But in Tennyson the effects were deliberately sought and secured. One might conjecture, though Lord Tennyson says nothing on the subject, that among the suggestions for _The Princess_ was the opening of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_. Here the King of Navarre devises the College of Recluses, which is broken up by the arrival of the Princess of France, Rosaline, and the other ladies:—