Like _Aurora Leigh_, _Lucile_, and other works, _Maud_ is under the disadvantage of being, practically, a novel of modern life in verse. Criticised as a tale of modern life (and it was criticised in that character), it could not be very highly esteemed. But the essence of _Maud_, of course, lies in the poetical vehicle. Nobody can cavil at the impressiveness of the opening stanzas— “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood”; with the keynotes of colour and of desolation struck; the lips of the hollow “dabbled with blood-red heath,” the “red-ribb’d ledges,” and “the flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands”; and the contrast in the picture of the child Maud— “Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall.” The poem abounds in lines which live in the memory, as in the vernal description— “A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime”; and the voice heard in the garden singing “A passionate ballad gallant and gay,” as Lovelace’s _Althea_, and the lines on the far-off waving of a white hand, “betwixt the cloud and the moon.” The lyric of “Birds in the high Hall-garden When twilight was falling, Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, They were crying and calling,” was a favourite of the poet. “What birds were these?” he is said to have asked a lady suddenly, when reading to a silent company. “Nightingales,” suggested a listener, who did not probably remember any other fowl that is vocal in the dusk. “No, they were rooks,” answered the poet. “Come into the Garden, Maud,” is as fine a love-song as Tennyson ever wrote, with a triumphant ring, and a soaring exultant note. Then the poem drops from its height, like a lark shot high in heaven; tragedy comes, and remorse, and the beautiful interlude of the “lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl.” Then follows the exquisite “O that ’twere possible,” and the dull consciousness of the poem of madness, with its dumb gnawing confusion of pain and wandering memory; the hero being finally left, in the author’s words, “sane but shattered.” Tennyson’s letters of the time show that the critics succeeded in wounding him: it was not a difficult thing to do. _Maud_ was threatened with a broadside from “that pompholygous, broad-blown Apollodorus, the gifted X.” People who have read Aytoun’s diverting _Firmilian_, where Apollodorus plays his part, and who remember “gifted Gilfillan” in _Waverley_, know who the gifted X. was. But X. was no great authority south of Tay. Despite the almost unanimous condemnation by public critics, the success of _Maud_ enabled Tennyson to buy Farringford, so he must have been better appreciated and understood by the world than by the reviewers. In February 1850 Tennyson returned to his old Arthurian themes, “the only big thing not done,” for Milton had merely glanced at Arthur, Dryden did not “Raise the Table Round again,”