"Audley Court," and the
"Gardener's Daughter," which has made Mr. Tennyson, not merely the
only English rival of Theocritus and Bion, but, in our opinion, as
much their superior as modern England is superior to ancient Greece.

Yet in "The Princess," perhaps, Mr. Tennyson rises higher still. The
idyllic manner alternates with the satiric, the pathetic, even the
sublime, by such imperceptible gradations, and continual delicate
variations of key, that the harmonious medley of his style becomes
the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet harmonious
fairyland in which his fancy ranges. In this work, too, Mr. Tennyson
shows himself more than ever the poet of the day. In it more than
ever the old is interpenetrated with the new--the domestic and
scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He dares, in every page,
to make use of modern words and notions, from which the mingled
clumsiness and archaism of his compeers shrinks, as unpoetical.
Though, as we just said, his stage is an ideal fairyland, yet he has
reached the ideal by the only true method--by bringing the Middle Age
forward to the Present one, and not by ignoring the Present to fall
back on a cold and galvanised Medievalism; and thus he makes his
"Medley" a mirror of the nineteenth century, possessed of its own new
art and science, its own new temptations and aspirations, and yet
grounded on, and continually striving to reproduce, the forms and
experiences of all past time. The idea, too, of "The Princess" is an
essentially modern one. In every age women have been tempted, by the
possession of superior beauty, intellect, or strength of will, to
deny their own womanhood, and attempt to stand alone as men, whether
on the ground of political intrigue, ascetic saintship, or
philosophic pride. Cleopatra and St. Hedwiga, Madame de Stael and
the Princess, are merely different manifestations of the same self-
willed and proud longing of woman to unsex herself, and realise,
single and self-sustained, some distorted and partial notion of her
own as to what the "angelic life" should be. Cleopatra acted out the
pagan ideal of an angel; St. Hedwiga, the medieval one; Madame de
Stael hers, with the peculiar notions of her time as to what
"spirituel" might mean; and in "The Princess" Mr. Tennyson has
embodied the ideal of that nobler, wider, purer, yet equally
fallacious, because equally unnatural, analogue, which we may meet
too often up and down England now. He sho