The 'Lotuseaters'--a kind of classical opium-eaters--are Ulysses and his crew. They land on the 'charmèd island,' and 'eat of the charmèd root,' and then they sing-- 'Long enough the winedark wave our weary bark did carry. This is lovelier and sweeter, Men of Ithaca, this is meeter, In the hollow rosy vale to tarry, Like a dreamy Lotuseater--a delicious Lotuseater! We will eat the Lotus, sweet As the yellow honeycomb; In the valley some, and some On the ancient heights divine, And no more roam, On the loud hoar foam, To the melancholy home, At the limits of the brine, The little isle of Ithaca, beneath the day's decline.'--p. 116. Our readers will, we think, agree that this is admirably characteristic, and that the singers of this song must have made pretty free with the intoxicating fruit. How they got home you must read in Homer:--Mr. Tennyson--himself, we presume, a dreamy lotus-eater, a delicious lotus-eater--leaves them in full song. Next comes another class of poems,--Visions. The first is the 'Palace of Art,' or a fine house, in which the poet _dreams_ that he sees a very fine collection of well-known pictures. An ordinary versifier would, no doubt, have followed the old routine, and dully described himself as walking into the Louvre, or Buckingham Palace, and there seeing certain masterpieces of painting:--a true poet dreams it. We have not room to hang many of these _chefs-d'œuvre_, but for a few we must find space.--'The Madonna'-- 'The maid mother by a crucifix, In yellow pastures sunny warm, Beneath branch work of costly sardonyx Sat smiling--_babe in arm_.'--p. 72. The use of the latter, apparently, colloquial phrase is a deep stroke of art. The form of expression is always used to express an habitual and characteristic action. A knight is described '_lance in rest_'--a dragoon, '_sword in hand_'--so, as the idea of the Virgin is inseparably connected with her child, Mr. Tennyson reverently describes her conventional position--'_babe in arm_.' His gallery of illustrious portraits is thus admirably arranged:--The Madonna--Ganymede--St. Cecilia--Europa--Deep-haired Milton--Shakspeare--Grim Dante--Michael Angelo--Luther--Lord Bacon--Cervantes--Calderon--King David--'the Halicarnassëan' (_quaere_, which of them?)--Alfred, (not Alfred Tennyson, though no doubt in any other man's gallery _he_ would have a place) and finally-- 'Isaïah, with fierce Ezekiel, Swarth Moses by the Coptic sea, Plato, _Petrarca_, Livy, and Raphaël, And eastern Confutzee!' We can hardly suspect the very original mind of Mr. Tennyson to have harboured any recollections of that celebrated Doric idyll, 'The groves of Blarney,' but certainly there is a strong likeness between Mr. Tennyson's list of pictures and the Blarney collection of statutes--