more, you delight to be called Artist. Now lay this close to your heart; If you accept mediocrity, you shall have mediocrity, and nought else.

Pictor. Here we are at the door of the Gallery; shall we go in?

Amico. As you will.

Pictor. Now look around you, Amico. Here are a hundred or two of pictures; not one of them that was painted without some thought. Each was a striving towards expression; each an attempt to embody the ideal. Now is it philosophical to throw them aside en masse? Nay, if you are a true critic, does not each demand of you, that you shall divine its law, and judge it thereby?

Amico. I must confess, not being an artist myself, I am not sure how far each picture is an attempt, or striving of the kind you name. But let me ask a few questions of you as to this process of creation. Here are two pictures of your own now, the " Neapolitan Girl" and the "Old Oak Tree." Which of these two is your favorite?

Pictor. The Girl is the last, and the last conquest is always the dearest; but before I had painted that, I loved the Old Oak better than any of my pictures. But then there is a reason for that. Two years ago, before I had fully determined to be a bonâ fide painter, I went into Berkshire with E—, who is now in Europe, to spend the College Vacation. Now besides being a poet, E- has of all persons I ever saw the most farsighted eye into nature, and I may truly say he opened my eyes. This huge pasture was our favorite resort. As you see in the picture, there is no fence in sight, so that it is as good as if there were none in the world. You see these bare hills covered with warm brown grass, and here and there with stunted bushes, on which the shadows skip so beautifully, - that bold ridge covered with pine trees, that stands out far beyond the rest of the range into the valley, and round whose base the river winds, — and that fortunate old mill, whose position makes it as invalua ble as a castle in the landscape. Well, I know not how it happened, but those were most happy days for us;- - each morning we would start with our sketch-books and our dinner, and make our way to this old, scathed, and leafless oak; and whatever point in the horizon attracted us, thither we went; and sometimes were gone for days, as occurred when we went to that blue mountain in the distance. I know not if it were the clear mountain air we breathed, or the sympathy and affection that bound us together, but I have never before or since experienced the serene happiness of those days. I have been ever since struggling with the world and life, and poor E- the gentle, the ten

der-hearted, has been cheated of the future upon which, like a spendthrift, he lived so prodigally. I suppose something of my sad feeling has crept into the picture.

and now about the other picture? I shall be

It was a head sketch from a and finished because I

Amico. Well; surprised if it has as long a story. Pictor. I confess it has not. sitter, because I thought it graceful, thought the sketch good. But don't you like it? Do you not think it a great improvement in my coloring?

Amico. Friend, I care not for your coloring, at least not now. When you painted the old oak, you were a man. The world opened before you in those days, as it should every day. Feeling as you did then, you could not but paint.

Pictor. But my good Amico! Would you have me walk upon stilts all the time? Or should I paint any better, because I live téte exaltée ?

Pictor. I should be an apostate to all my better feelings to say I was. But such states are involuntary. They are the gift

of the gods.

Amico. Now, O my friend! you have touched the root of the matter. You want faith, without which was no great character ever built up, no great work achieved. And, Pictor, you may paint till you reach threescore and ten, and you may please yourself with the idea that you are forming a style, or adding to your knowledge of color, but unless you have faith, you shall not be saved. And now you may understand why I demur, as to our being called on to criticise every painting according to its law.

Pictor. But surely you do not contend that the painters, as a class, have been of that high and severe character you demand of us.

Amico. "The painters as a class" I do not speak of, but the artists, the men who created art. Most painters think they have done enough, when they have acquired all the age can teach them. To the Artist this is but the Alphabet wherewith he shall teach the age.

Pictor. But you demand that we should all do that which Nature permits only to her favorites.

Amico. Tell me now; did you ever notice how rich certain past eras have been in these "favorites," as you call them? Pictor. Certainly; and the race, I often think, has degenerated.

Amico. Do you suppose this degeneracy is in the child, or the man?

Pictor. Doubtless, if the child be the same that he was in the

days of Raphael, his chance of being a painter is infinitely less from the prosaic tendency of everything around us. Why, Raphael created painters not less than pictures!

Amico. Did he create them by exciting their enthusiasm, or by giving them some part of himself?

Pictor. Of course, by calling out what was in them. Amico. Then it was in them. That is all I want. Now if many men have the power, what we want is to call it out. Which, think you, is the nobler way, and most likely to lead to great results, to wait if perchance some one may come along sufficient to excite your enthusiasm, or to take the matter in your own hands and wait for no man? Nay, is not the history of the great a sufficient answer? They all went alone.

Pictor. This is fine theory, Amico; but you demand the impossible. Your great men made painting, and that is their title to glory. But for us the field is filled. There remain no such conquests in art for us, as Raphael and Giotto made.

Amico. O man of little faith! Is there nothing for Columbus to do now, because America has been discovered? We stand all upon a Western shore, with a whole unknown world awaiting our discovery. To believe it is there, is faith. To know it, is given to no man. Where would have been the merit of the great Cristoval, if some messenger had revealed all to him?

Be a new Ulysses. Do you remember the old Florentine's verses? Tennyson has hammered them out very skilfully, but here is the gold itself.

"Nè dolcezza del figlio, nè la pieta
Del vecchio padre, nè 'l debito amore
Lo qual dovea Penelope far lieta,

Vincer potero dentro a me l'ardore
Ch'io ebbi a divenir nel mondo esperto,
E degli vizi umani e del valore ;

Ma misi me per l' alto mare aperto
Sol con un legno, e con quella compagna
Picciola dalla qual non fui deserto.

O frati, dissi, che per cento milia
Perigli siete giunti all' occidente,
A questa tanto picciola vigilia

De' vostri sensi, ch' è di rimanente,
Non vogliate negar l' esperienza,
Diretro al sol, del mondo senza gente.
Considerate la vostra semenza :
Fatti non foste, a viver come bruti,
Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza."

Inferno, Canto XXVI.

RECORD OF THE MONTHS.

Poems. By ALFRED TENNYSON. Two Volumes. Boston: W. D. Ticknor.

TENNYSON is more simply the songster than any poet of our time. With him the delight of musical expression is first, the thought second. It was well observed by one of our companions, that he has described just what we should suppose to be his method of composition in this verse from "The Miller's Daughter."

"A love-song I had somewhere read,
An echo from a measured strain,

Beat time to nothing in my head
From some odd corner of the brain.
It haunted me, the morning long,
With weary sameness in the rhymes,
The phantom of a silent song,

That went and came a thousand times."

So large a proportion of even the good poetry of our time is either over-ethical or over-passionate, and the stock poetry is so deeply tainted with a sentimental egotism, that this, whose chief merits lay in its melody and picturesque power, was most refreshing. What a relief, after sermonizing and wailing had dulled the sense with such a weight of cold abstraction, to be soothed by this ivory lute!

Not that he wanted nobleness and individuality in his thoughts, or a due sense of the poet's vocation; but he won us to truths, not forced them upon us; as we listened, the cope

"Of the self-attained futurity

Was cloven with the million stars which tremble
O'er the deep mind of dauntless infamy."

And he seemed worthy thus to address his friend,

"Weak truth a-leaning on her crutch, Wan, wasted truth in her utmost need, Thy kingly intellect shall feed,

Until she be an athlete bold."

Unless thus sustained, the luxurious sweetness of his verse must have wearied. Yet it was not of aim or meaning we thought most, but of his exquisite sense for sounds and melodies, as marked by himself in the description of Cleopatra.

"Her warbling voice, a lyre of widest range,
Touched by all passion, did fall down and glance
From tone to tone, and glided through all change
Of liveliest utterance."

Or in the fine passage in the Vision of Sin, where

"Then the music touched the gates and died;
Rose again from where it seemed to fail,

Stormed in orbs of song, a growing gale;" &c.

Or where the Talking Oak composes its serenade for the pretty Alice; but indeed his descriptions of melody are almost as abundant as his melodies, though the central music of the poet's mind is, he says, as that of the

"fountain

Like sheet lightning,
Ever brightening

With a low melodious thunder;
All day and all night it is ever drawn
From the brain of the purple mountain
Which stands in the distance yonder:
It springs on a level of bowery lawn,

And the mountain draws it from heaven above,
And it sings a song of undying love."

Next to his music, his delicate, various, gorgeous music, stands his power of picturesque representation. And his, unlike those of most poets, are eye-pictures, not mind-pictures. And yet there is no hard or tame fidelity, but a simplicity and ease at representation (which is quite another thing from reproduction) rarely to be paralleled. How, in the Palace of Art, for instance, they are unrolled slowly and gracefully, as if painted one after another on the same canvass. The touch is calm and masterly, though the result is looked at with a sweet, selfpleasing eye. Who can forget such as this, and of such there are many, painted with as few strokes and with as complete a success?

“A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand;

Left on the shore; that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white."

Tennyson delights in a garden. Its groups, and walks, and mingled bloom intoxicate him, and us through him. So high is his organization, and so powerfully stimulated by color and perfume, that it heightens all our senses too, and the rose is glorious, not from detecting its ideal beauty, but from a perfection of hue and scent, we never felt before. All the earlier poems are flower-like, and this tendency is so strong in him, that a friend observed, he could not keep up the character of the tree in his Oak of Summer Chase, but made it talk like an enormous flower." The song,

"A spirit haunts the year's last hours,"

is not to be surpassed for its picture of the autumnal garden.