lamentations of half-demented agony, “My Baby! the bones that had sucked me, the bones that had laughed and had cried, Theirs! O no! They are mine not theirs—they had moved in my side.” Then the heart-gripping phrase breaking forth ever and anon in the imaginative metaphorical utterance of wild emotion, to which the sons and daughters of the people are often moved, eloquent beyond all eloquence, white-hot from the heart! “Dust to dust low down! let us hide! but they set him so high, that all the ships of the world could stare at him passing by.” In this last book of ballads the style bears the same relation to the earlier and daintier that the style of “Samson Agonistes” bears to that of “Comus.” “The Revenge” is equally masculine, simple, and sinewy in appropriate strength of expression, a most spirited rendering of a heroic naval action—worthy of a place, as is also the grand ode on the death of Wellington, beside the war odes of Campbell, the “Agincourt” of Drayton, and the “Rule Britannia” of Thomson. The irregular metre of the “Ballad of the Fleet” is most remarkable as a vehicle of the sense, resonant with din of battle, full-voiced with rising and bursting storm toward the close, like the equally spirited concluding scenes of “Harold,” that depict the battle of Senlac. The dramatic characterizations in “Harold” and “Queen Mary” are excellent—Mary, Harold, the Conqueror, the Confessor, Pole, Edith, Stigand, and other subordinate sketches, being striking and successful portraits; while “Harold” is full also of incident and action—a really memorable modern play; but the main motive of “Queen Mary” fails in tragic dignity and interest, though there is about it a certain grim subdued pathos, as of still life, and there are some notable scenes. Tennyson is admirably dramatic in the portrayal of individual moods, of men or women in certain given situations. His plays are fine, and of real historic interest, but not nearly so remarkable as the dramatic poems I have named, as the earlier “St. Simeon Stylites,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” or as the “Northern Farmer,” “Cobblers,” and “Village Wife,” among his later works. These last are perfectly marvellous in their fidelity and humorous photographic realism. That the poet of “Œnone,” “The Lotus-eaters,” and the Arthur cycle should have done these also is wonderful. The humor of them is delightful, and the rough homely diction perfect. One wishes indeed that the “dramatic fragments” collected by Lamb, like gold-dust out of the rather dreary sand-expanse of Elizabethan playwrights, were so little fragmentary as these. Tennyson’s short dramatic poems are quintessential; in a brief glimpse he contrives to reveal the whole man or woman. You would know the old “Northern Farmer,” with his reproach to “God Amoighty” for not “letting him aloan,” and the odious farmer of the new style, with his “Proputty! Proputty!” wherever you met them. But “Dora,” the “Grand-mother,” “Lady