Each coltsfoot down the grassy bent, Whose round leaves hold the gathered shower, Each quaintly folded cuckoo pint, And silver-paly cuckoo flower. II Tennyson’s genius was slow in maturing. The poems contributed by him to the volume of 1827, _Poems by Two Brothers_, are not without some slight promise, but are very far from indicating extraordinary powers. A great advance is discernible in _Timbuctoo_, but that Matthew Arnold should have discovered in it the germ of Tennyson’s future powers is probably to be attributed to the youth of the critic. Tennyson was in his twenty-second year when the _Poems Chiefly Lyrical_ appeared, and what strikes us in these poems is certainly not what Arthur Hallam saw in them: much rather what Coleridge and Wilson discerned in them. They are the poems of a fragile and somewhat morbid young man in whose temper we seem to see a touch of Hamlet, a touch of Romeo and, more healthily, a touch of Mercutio. Their most promising characteristic is the versatility displayed. Thus we find _Mariana_ side by side with the _Supposed Confessions_, the _Ode to Memory_ with οἱ ῥέοντες, _The Ballad of Oriana_ with _The Dying Swan_, _Recollections of The Arabian Nights_ with _The Poet_. Their worst fault is affectation. Perhaps the utmost that can be said for them is that they display a fine but somewhat thin vein of original genius, after deducing what they owe to Coleridge, to Keats and to other poets. This is seen in the magical touches of description, in the exquisite felicity of expression and rhythm which frequently mark them, in the pathos and power of such a poem as _Oriana_, in the pathos and charm of such poems as _Mariana_ and _A Dirge_, in the rich and almost gorgeous fancy displayed in _The Recollections_. The poems of 1833 are much more ambitious and strike deeper notes. Here comes in for the first time that σπουδαιότης, that high seriousness which is one of Tennyson’s chief characteristics—we see it in _The Palace of Art_, in _Œnone_ and in the verses _To J. S._ But in intrinsic merit the poems were no advance on their predecessors, for the execution was not equal to the design. The best, such as _Œnone_, _A Dream of Fair Women_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Lady of Shalott_—I am speaking of course of these poems in their first form—were full of extraordinary blemishes. The volume was degraded by pieces which were very unworthy of him, such as _O Darling Room_ and the verses _To Christopher North_, and affectations of the worst kind deformed many, nay, perhaps the majority of the poems. But the capital defect lay in the workmanship. The diction is often languid and slipshod, sometimes quaintly affected, and we can never go far without encountering lines, stanzas, whole poems which cry aloud for the file. The power and charm of Tennyson’s poetry, even at its ripest, depend very largely, often mainly, on expression, and the couplet which he envied Browning,