And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
We heard behind the woodbine vail
The milk that bubbled in the pail,
And buzzings of the honeyed hours.


"The volume is pervaded by a religious feeling, and an ardent
aspiration for the advancement of society,--as may be gathered from
our first quotation. These two sentiments impart elevation, faith,
and resignation; so that memory, thought, and a chastened tenderness,
generally predominate over deep grief. The grave character of the
theme forbids much indulgence in conceits such as Tennyson sometimes
falls into, and the execution is more finished than his volumes always
are: there are very few prosaic lines, and few instances of that
excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish. The nature
of the plan--which, after all, is substantially though not in form a
set of sonnets on a single theme--is favorable to those pictures of
common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial
feeling and a perception of the lurking beautiful, which are the
author's distinguishing characteristic. The scheme, too, enables him
appropriately to indulge in theological and metaphysical reflections;
where he is not quite so excellent. Many of the pieces taken singly
are happy examples of Tennyson, though not perhaps the very happiest.
As a whole, there is inevitably something of sameness in the work, and
the subject is unequal to its long expansion; yet its nature is such,
there is so much of looseness in the plan, that it might have been
doubled or trebled without incongruity. It is one of those books
which depend upon individual will and feeling, rather than upon a
broad subject founded in nature and tractable by the largest laws of
art. Hence, though not irrespective of laws, such works depend upon