many pleasing pictures, evokes much profound feeling, and
links a world of graceful association with the memory of the
dead. Perhaps no other elegiac poet in the language strikes
so many chords in the human heart, by touching those latent
springs of feeling which bind the various ranks and conditions
of life into one common brotherhood of humanity. The
description of the change from light to dusk, and of dusk to
light, of the physical, as emblematic of the spiritual, dawn;*
the-thirst after the new year as after a new cycle of existence;!
the identification of others' sorrows with his own, and of both
with the bleak aspects of nature ; % the challenge by which Fate is
defied to separate him from a soul blent with the elements of all
that is good and fair around him ; § the golden reminiscences of
intellectual feasts and aesthetic pastimes ;|| the seraphic force
of the intellect which has disappeared, foreshadowing the type
of the Coming Man ; — all these are rendered, fragmentary it is
true, and mixed up with much that is commonplace, yet with a
force which will vitalize them and make them sparkle like gems,
as long as elegiac poetry occupies a shelf in our literature. But
to write a poem of sustained pathos, like the " Lycidas" or the
"Adonais," I do not think Tennyson capable. His grief is always
called forth by surrounding objects, upon which it leans as a
crutch, and without which it could not possibly get along, instead
of welling up of itself, existing apart, and only using external
images as a gauge of its strength and profundity. In other great
elegiac poets, the world within overflows the world without.
