innumerable bees?

Or again, what combination of richness with simplicity in such a
passage as this:

Breathe upon my brows;
In that fine air I tremble, all the past
Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this
I scarce believe, and all the rich to come
Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning leaves.

How Mr. Tennyson can have attained the prodigal fulness of thought
and imagery which distinguishes this poem, and especially the last
canto, without his style ever becoming overloaded, seldom even
confused, is perhaps one of the greatest marvels of the whole
production. The songs themselves, which have been inserted between
the cantos in the last edition of the book, seem, perfect as they
are, wasted and smothered among the surrounding fertility; till we
discover that they stand there, not merely for the sake of their
intrinsic beauty, but serve to call back the reader's mind, at every
pause in the tale of the Princess's folly, to that very healthy ideal
of womanhood which she has spurned.

At the end of the first canto, fresh from the description of the
female college, with its professoresses, and hostleresses, and other
utopian monsters, we turn the page, and--

As through the land at eve we went,
And pluck'd the ripen'd ears.
We fell out, my wife and I,
And kissed again with tears:

And blessings on the falling-out
That all the more endears,
When we fall out with those we love,
And kiss again with tears!

For when we came where lies the child
We lost in other years,
There above the little grave,
We kissed again with tears.

Between the next two cantos intervenes the well-known cradle-song,
perhaps the best of all; and at the next interval is the equally
well-known bugle-song, the idea of which is that of twin-labour and
twin-fame, in a pair of lovers:

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.

In the next, the memory of wife and child inspirits the soldier in
the field; in the next, the sight of the fallen hero's child opens
the sluices of his widow's tears; and in the last, and perhaps the
most beautiful of all, the poet has succeeded, in the new edition, in
superadding a new form of emotion to a canto in which he seemed to
have exhausted every resource of pathos which his subject allowed;
and prepares us for the triumph of that art by which he makes us,
after all, love the heroine whom he at first taug