Nor the sun burns, but all things rest and thrive."


So fortunate in their transmission through poets have been the lines
of "the Ionian father of the rest," the greatest of them all.

In the variety of excellences which marks Tennyson, the new English
idylls of 1842 hold their prominent place. Nothing can be more
exquisite and more English than the picture of "the garden that I
love." Theocritus cannot be surpassed; but the idyll matches to the
seventh of his, where it is most closely followed, and possesses such
a picture of a girl as the Sicilian never tried to paint.

Dora is another idyll, resembling the work of a Wordsworth in a clime
softer than that of the Fells. The lays of Edwin Morris and Edward
Bull are not among the more enduring of even the playful poems. The
St Simeon Stylites appears "made to the hand" of the author of Men
and Women rather than of Tennyson. The grotesque vanity of the
anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the
truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St
Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet
lightly turns to "society verse" lifted up into the air of poetry, in
the charm of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches of
actual history; and thence to the strength and passion of Love and
Duty. Shall


"Sin itself be found
The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun?"