CRITICAL OPINIONS 11
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ounds, an instinctive appreciation of the beautiful and delicatein words, hardly ever equaled. Though his later works speakless of the blossom-time—show less of the efflorescence and irides-cence and mere glance and gleam of colored words—they displayno falling off, but rather an advance, in the mightier elements ofrhythmic speech.” —PETER BAYNE. ‘* Not often has a lovelier story been recited. After the idyllicintroduction, the body of the poem is composed in a semi-heroicverse, Other works of our poet are greater, but none is so fasci-_ nating as this romantic tale: English throughout, yet combiningthe England of Coeur de Leon with that of Victoria in one be-witching picture. Some of the author’s most delicately musicallines—‘ jewels five words long’—are herein contained, and theending of each canto is an effective piece of art. . “ Few will deny that, taken together, these [songs] constitute_ the finest group of songs produced in our century; and the third,known as the ‘Bugle Song,’ seems to many the most perfect- English lyric since the time of Shakespeare. In Zhe Princess _ we also find Tennyson’s most successful studies upon the modelof the Theocritan isometric verse. He was the first to enrich ourpoetry with this class of melodies, for the burlesque pastorals of_ the eighteenth century need not be considered. Not one of the 'blank-verse songs in his Arthurian epic equals in structure orfeeling the ‘Tears, idle tears,’ and ‘O swallow, swallow, flying,flying south.’”— Victorian Poets: E. C. SreEDMAN. “One hardly knows how to take the poet. At one moment heis very much in earnest ; the next moment he seems to be makingfun of the woman’s college. The style is like a breeze that blowsnorthwest by southeast ; it may be a very lively breeze, and fullof sweet odors from every quarter; but the trouble is that wecannot tell which way totrim our sails to catch the force of it, andso our craft goes jibing to and fro, without making progress in anydirection. ‘«T think we feel this uncertainty most of all in the charactersof the Princess and the Prince,—and I name the Princess firstbecause she is evidently the hero of the poem, Sometimes sheappears to be very admirable and lovable, in a stately kind ofbeauty ; but again she seems like a woman from whom a manwith ordinary prudence and a proper regard for his own sense of
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