We know of few similar phenomena in the history of literature--few such examples of rupture with a consecrated past. Poets in their prime have groped and experimented, tried this and that, and finally made a great success in a very different vein from that in which they had found their early successes. But the writers in prose or in verse are few who, after a lifetime spent in elaborating and perfecting a certain definite and extremely characteristic manner, have at Mr. Tennyson's age suddenly dismissed it from use and stood forth clad from head to foot in a disguise without a flaw. We are sure that the other great English poet--the author of "The Ring and the Book,"--would be quite incapable of any such feat. The more's the pity, as many of his readers will say! _Queen Mary_ is upward of three hundred pages long; and yet in all these three hundred pages there is hardly a trace of the Tennyson we know. Of course the reader is on the watch for reminders of the writer he has greatly loved; and of course, vivid signs being absent, he finds a certain eloquence in the slightest intimations. When he reads that ----"that same tide Which, coming with our coming, seemed to smile And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidest, Ran sunless down and moaned against the piers," he seems for a moment to detect the peculiar note and rhythm of "Enoch Arden" or "The Princess." Just preceding these, indeed, is a line which seems Tennysonian because it is in a poem by Tennyson: "Last night I climbed into the gate-house, Brett, And scared the gray old porter and his wife." In such touches as these the Tennysonian note is faintly struck; but if the poem were unsigned, they would not do much toward pointing out the author. On the other hand, the fine passages in _Queen Mary_ are conspicuously deficient in those peculiar cadences--that exquisite perfume of diction--which every young poet of the day has had his hour of imitating. We may give as an example Pole's striking denial of the charge that the Church of Rome has ever known trepidation: "What, my Lord! The Church on Petra's rock? Never! I have seen A pine in Italy that cast its shadow Athwart a cataract; firm stood the pine-- The cataract shook the shadow. To my mind The cataract typed the headlong plunge and fall Of heresy to the pit: the pine was Rome. You see, my Lords, It was the shadow of the Church that trembled."