In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809- ----), a young graduate of Cambridge, published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages, entitled _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, like the _Sleeping Beauty_, _Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_, were full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like character, and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's studies, or {289} exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few sweet chords, but no aria. A number of them--_Claribel_, _Lilian_, _Adeline_, _Isabel_, _Mariana_, _Madeline_--were sketches of women; not character portraits, like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions of temperament, of delicately, differentiated types of feminine beauty. In _Mariana_, expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid, in Shakspere's _Measure for Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed an art then peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the central feeling by landscape accessories. The level waste, the stagnant sluices, the neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar, re-enforce, by their monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless waiting and weariness of life in the one human figure of the poem. In _Mariana_, the _Ode to Memory_, and the _Dying Swan_, it was the fens of Cambridge and of his native Lincolnshire that furnished Tennyson's scenery. "Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh, Where from the frequent bridge, Like emblems of infinity, The trenched waters run from sky to sky."