letters. Five or six of the pieces then left out were added as
Juvenilia in the collected works of 1871, 1872. The whole mass
deserves the attention of students of the poet's development.

This early volume may be said to contain, in the germ, all the great
original qualities of Tennyson, except the humour of his rural
studies and the elaboration of his Idylls. For example, in Mariana
we first note what may be called his perfection and accomplishment.
The very few alterations made later are verbal. The moated grange of
Mariana in Measure for Measure, and her mood of desertion and
despair, are elaborated by a precision of truth and with a perfection
of harmony worthy of Shakespeare himself, and minutely studied from
the natural scenes in which the poet was born. If these verses alone
survived out of the wreck of Victorian literature, they would
demonstrate the greatness of the author as clearly as do the
fragments of Sappho. Isabel (a study of the poet's mother) is almost
as remarkable in its stately dignity; while Recollections of the
Arabian Nights attest the power of refined luxury in romantic
description, and herald the unmatched beauty of The Lotos-Eaters.
The Poet, again, is a picture of that which Tennyson himself was to
fulfil; and Oriana is a revival of romance, and of the ballad, not
limited to the ballad form as in its prototype, Helen of Kirkconnell.
Curious and exquisite experiment in metre is indicated in the Leonine
Elegiacs, in Claribel, and several other poems. Qualities which were
not for long to find public expression, speculative powers brooding,
in various moods, on ultimate and insoluble questions, were attested
by The Mystic, and Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive
Mind not in Unity with Itself, an unlucky title of a remarkable
performance. "In this, the most agitated of all his poems, we find
the soul urging onward