does write in that mood points to the one
illuminative truth now essential to be remembered. The voice to which we
are privileged to listen, perhaps for the last time, is the voice of a
great poet--by which is meant a poet who is able, not through the medium
of intellect but through the medium of emotion, to make the total
experience of mankind his own experience, and to express it not only in
the form of art but with the fire of nature. The element of power, in
all the expressions of such a mind, will fluctuate; but every one of its
expressions will be sincere and in a greater or less degree will be
vital with a universal and permanent significance. That virtue is in
Alfred Tennyson's comedy of _Robin Hood_, and that virtue will insure
for it an abiding endurance in affectionate public esteem.

The realm into which this play allures its auditor is the realm of
_Ivanhoe_--the far-off, romantic region of Sherwood forest, in the
ancient days of stout king Richard the First. The poet has gone to the
old legends of Robin Hood and to the ballads that have been made upon
them, and out of those materials--using them freely, according to his
fancy--he has chosen his scene and his characters and has made his
story. It is not the England of the mine and the workshop that he
represents, and neither is it the England of the trim villa and the
formal landscape; it is the England of the feudal times--of gray castle
towers, and armoured knights, and fat priests, and wandering minstrels,
and crusades and tournaments; England in rush-strewn bowers and under
green boughs; the England in which Wamba jested and Blondel sung. To
enter into that realm is to leave the barren world of prose; to feel
again the cool, sweet winds of summer upon the brow of youth; to catch,
in fitful glimpses, the shimmer of the Lincoln green in the sunlit,
golden glades of the forest, and to hear the merry note of the huntsman
commingled, far away, with "horns of Elfland faintly blowing." The
appeal is made to the primitive, elemental, poetical instinct of
mankind; and no detail of realism is obtruded, no question of
probability considered, no agony of the sin-tortured spirit subjected to
analysis, no controversy promoted and no moral lesson enforced. For once
the public is favoured with a serious poetical play, which aims simply
to diffuse happiness by arousing sympathy with pleasurable scenes and
picturesque persons, with virtue that is piquant and humour that i