,
the verse--

"I kissed her slender hand,
She took the kiss sedately,
Maud is not seventeen,
But she is tall and stately,"

which our intelligent critic does not like, appears to us perfect--in
its place. Sweeter love-poetry than the finest parts of "Maud" is not to
be found in the language; the remark being confined to the more
superficial kinds of love. For the "tender passion" of the poem is,
after all, superficial and thin: the strongest parts being the cynical.
It has always been a grief to us that so much exquisite poetry (Cantos
XII., XVIII., XXII., in Part I; and IV. in Part II.) should have been
framed in what is really nothing but a very poor "sensation" novel, with
a moral or lesson which is poorer still. Poetry is not bound to be
unintermittingly poetic; there must be flat passages,--but such
second-hand phrasing as "a war in defence of the right"--"that an iron
tyranny now should bend or cease"--"a cause that I felt to be pure and
true"--"a giant liar"--is intolerable in a poem of which the climax is
so high-pitched. Better the merest conversational familiarity, than this
rhetorical magniloquence.

Before passing from Tennyson's poems, we cannot help noting a curious
example of Dr. Bayne's tendency to excessive praise and admiration. In
that very poor poem, "Sea-Dreams," the city clerk's wife induces her
husband to forgive the just-dead man who has robbed them of their
savings. Upon which Dr. Bayne remarks; "There is not a nobler heroine in
literature than this wife of a city clerk, and I see no reason to
believe that there are not many such to be found in London." Nor do
we--six women out of ten exhibit every week of their lives "heroism"
just as "noble." It is perfectly commonplace; and it is the critic's
warm-heartedness which betrays him into these extravagancies of
language.

The Essay on Ruskin has been nearly all rewritten, and it is a fine
specimen of studious candour, and something more. All we will add is,
that we hope Mr. Bayne holds, along with Mr. Ruskin--though it hardly
looks as if he did--that "the destruction of beauty is a sacrilege and a
sin." This is undoubtedly a fair account of what Mr. Ruskin means in
certain portions of his writings, and he is not the only one who has
suffered "anguish," little short of despair, at certain "works of
profanation." Mr. Bayne quotes Mr. Ruskin's passionate words about the
befouling and desecration of the "pools and streams" around Ca