e without definite theme, resembling an artist's studies, or
exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few sweet chords, but
no _aria_. A number of them--_Claribel, Lilian, Adeline, Isabel,
Mariana, Madeline_--were sketches of women; not character portraits,
like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions of temperament, of
delicately differentiated types of feminine beauty. In _Mariana_,
expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid in Shakspere's _Measure for
Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed an art then
peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the central feeling
by landscape accessories. The level waste, the stagnant sluices, the
neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar, re-enforce, by their
monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless waiting and weariness
of life in the one human figure of the poem. In _Mariana_, the _Ode to
Memory_, and the _Dying Swan_, it was the fens of Cambridge and of his
native Lincolnshire that furnished Tennyson's scenery.

Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenched waters run from sky to sky.

A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited a greater scope and
variety, but was still in his earlier manner. The studies of feminine
types were continued in _Margaret, Fatima, Eleanore, Mariana in the
South_, and _A Dream of Fair Women_, suggested by Chaucer's _Legend of
Good Women_. In the _Lady of Shalott_ the poet first touched the
Arthurian legends. The subject is the same as that of _Elaine_, in the
_Idylls of the King_, but the treatment is shadowy, and even
allegorical. In _OEnone_ and the _Lotus Eaters_ he handled Homeric
subjects, but in a romantic fashion which contrasts markedly with the
style of his later pieces, _Ulysses_ and _Tithonus._ These last have the
true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of weighty
and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general, Tennyson's art is
unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite; not statuesque so much as
picturesque. He is a great painter, and the critics complain that in
passages calling for movement and action--a battle, a tournament, or the
like--his figures stand still as in a tableau; and they contrast such
passages unfavorably with scenes of the same kind in Scott, and with
Browning's spirited ballad, _How we brought the Good News from Ghent to
Aix_. In the _Palace of Art_