Yet “Mariana” had the virtue, which the poet has displayed so pre-eminently since, of concentration. Every subtle touch enhances the effect he intends to produce, that of the desolation of the deserted woman, whose hope is nearly extinguished; Nature hammering a fresh nail into her coffin with every innocent aspect or movement. Beautiful too are “Love and Death” and “The Poet’s Mind;” while in “The Poet” we have the oft-quoted line: “Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.” Mr. G. Brimley was the first, I believe, to point out the distinctive peculiarity of Lord Tennyson’s treatment of landscape. It is treated by him dramatically; that is to say, the details of it are selected so as to be interpretative of the particular mood or emotion he wishes to represent. Thus in the two Marianas, they are painted with the minute distinctness appropriate to the morbid and sickening observation of the lonely woman, whose attention is distracted by no cares, pleasures, or satisfied affections. That is a pregnant remark, a key to unlock a good deal of Tennyson’s work with. Byron and Shelley, though they are carried out of themselves in contemplating Nature, do not, I think, often take her as interpreter of moods alien to their own. In Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” it is true, Margaret’s lonely grief is thus delineated though the neglect of her garden and the surroundings of her cottage; yet this is not so characteristic a note of his nature-poetry. In the “Miller’s Daughter” and the “Gardener’s Daughter” the lovers would be little indeed without the associated scene so germane to the incidents narrated, both as congenial setting of the picture for a spectator, and as vitally fused with the emotion of the lovers; while never was more lovely landscape-painting of the gentle order than in the “Gardener’s Daughter.” Lessing, who says that poetry ought never to be pictorial, would, I suppose, much object to Tennyson’s; but to me, I confess, this mellow, lucid, luminous word-painting of his is entirely delightful. It refutes the criticism that words cannot convey a picture by perfectly conveying it. _Solvitur ambulando_; the Gardener’s Daughter standing by her rose-bush, “a sight to make an old man young,” remaining in our vision to confound all crabbed pedants with pet theories.