"'Break, Break, Break'."


7. POLITICAL GROUP

'"You ask me."'
'"Of old sat Freedom."'
'"Love thou thy Land."'
'The Goose.'


In surveying these poems two things must strike every one--their very
wide range and their very fragmentary character. There is scarcely any
side of life on which they do not touch, scarcely any phase of passion
and emotion to which they do not give exquisite expression. Take the
love poems: compare 'Fatima' with 'Isabel', 'The Miller's Daughter' with
'Locksley Hall', 'The Gardener's Daughter' with 'Madeline', or 'Mariana'
with Cleopatra in the 'Dream of Fair Women'. When did love find purer
and nobler expression than in 'Love and Duty?' When has sorrow found
utterance more perfect than in the verses 'To J. S '., or the passion for
the past than in 'Break, Break, Break', or revenge and jealousy than in
'The Sisters?' In 'The Two Voices', 'The Palace of Art' and 'The Vision
of Sin' we are in another sphere. They are appeals to the soul of man on
subjects of momentous concern to him. And each is a masterpiece. What is
proper to philosophy and what is proper to poetry have never perhaps
been so happily blended. They have all the sensuous charm of Keats, but
the prose of Hume could not have presented the truths which they are
designed to convey with more lucidity and precision. In that superb
fragment the 'Morte d'Arthur' we have many of the noblest attributes of
Epic poetry. ''none' is the perfection of the classical idyll, 'The