This reads like Tennyson doing his best not to be Tennyson, and very fairly succeeding. Well as he succeeds, however, and admirably skilful and clever as is his attempt throughout to play tricks with his old habits of language, and prove that he was not the slave but the master of the classic Tennysonian rhythm, I think that few readers can fail to ask themselves whether the new gift is of equal value with the old. The question will perhaps set them to fingering over the nearest volume of the poet at hand, to refresh their memory of his ancient magic. It has rendered the present writer this service, and he feels as if it were a considerable one. Every great poet has something that he does supremely well, and when you come upon Tennyson at his best you feel that you are dealing with poetry at its highest. One of the best passages in _Queen Mary_--the only one, it seems to me, very sensibly warmed by the "fire" commemorated by the London _Times_--is the passionate monologue of Mary when she feels what she supposes to be the intimations of maternity: "He hath awaked, he hath awaked! He stirs within the darkness! Oh Philip, husband! how thy love to mine Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw, That make me shamed and tongue-tied in my love. The second Prince of Peace-- The great unborn defender of the Faith, Who will avenge me of mine enemies-- He comes, and my star rises. The stormy Wyatts and Northumberlands And proud ambitions of Elizabeth, And all her fiercest partisans, are pale Before my star! His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Ind! His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down! His faith shall clothe the world that will be his, Like universal air and sunshine! Open, Ye everlasting gates! The King is here!-- My star, my son!" That is very fine, and its broken verses and uneven movement have great felicity and suggestiveness. But their magic is as nothing, surely, to the magic of such a passage as this: "Yet hold me not for ever in thine East; How can my nature longer mix with thine? Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet Upon thy glimmering thresholds, where the stream Floats up from those dim fields about the homes Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows of the happier dead. Release me and restore me to the ground; Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave; Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; I, earth in earth, forget these empty courts, And thee returning on thy silver wheels."