Death of Elaine. Making a treacherous quiet in his heart, Far into the rich city, where, alone, She murmur'd, "Vain, in vain : it cannot be. Went half the night repeating, "Must I die?" 173 Sir Lancelot recovers at last, and asks what return he can make to his lovely nurse for all her care of him. Here follows a difficult passage, extremely well managed. Elaine says boldly that she would be Sir Lancelot's wife, and her offer is rejected. She would then fain to follow him and see his face, without being his wife to this proposal Lancelot objects on the score of impropriety; and assuring her that this fancied love will pass away, promises to dower her whenever she shall really love with "half his realm beyond the seas," and adds, "More than this I cannot." Those who wish to see this inverted courtship made, as far as possible, natural and graceful, must go to the Idyll itself. This is one of the passages which we cannot render into other words than Mr Tennyson's, without making it ungraceful. Elaine's father, who overhears the offer and refusal, begs of Sir Lancelot to cure the maiden by some discourtesy. He obeys by riding away without taking leave of Elaine, though he is aware that she is watching him from the window. Poor Elaine solves the question, "Must I die?" She falls sick, and her father and brothers, hoping to cure her love, tell her of the slanders now rife about Sir Lancelot and the queen, to which the lily maid makes reply, "Sweet father, all too faint and sick am I And greatest, though my love had no return: I should but die the sooner." The priest is then called in; and Elaine, with a "face bright as for sin forgiven," dictates a letter, and makes her father promise that as soon as she shall die, her corpse, decked in rich robes, shall be rowed by a dumb servant, this letter being folded in her hand, to the queen's palace. The boat, thus arranged, arrives just as Lancelot has presented his nine diamonds to the queen; and she, believing him faithless to her, has first returned them that they may deck his lady of the broidered sleeve, and then, that they may not do so, has flung them into the river. This scene, the letter itself, and the concluding pages, seem to us to be the least effective part of the poem. So singular a procession should produce great effect, but it does not. We feel that Elaine herself would have been disappointed had she known the result; and yet this is evidently not intended. We suspect, however, that the subject has been more to blame than its treatment. A forlorn maiden, whose love is unreturned, cannot by any dramatic effect be expected to awaken very serious emotion in a lover just agitated by the joy of seeing his mistress after a long parting, and the pain of bearing her first burst of anger. Elaine is buried by the queen and knights with great state, and Sir Lancelot returns to his old ways. The fourth and last Idyll represents the repentance of Guinevere, her withdrawal into a nunnery, and the final breaking up of this fellowship of the Round Table through her guilty conduct. This Idyl we have little hesitation in pronouncing to be Mr Tennyson's highest effort. We will not mar the reader's enjoyment of the complete unity of effect, which is its chief merit, by giving him an anticipative acquaintance with any portions of it. In general style, it is precisely the same as the Idylls of which we have now given a tolerably full description. We take it for granted that this volume constitutes the commencement of a more or less complete series of poems on the Arthurian Legends. Mr Tennyson has only to be careful in the selection of the points for illustration-avoiding, we would venture to advise, such long and rambling stories as that of "Enid," -to make this work not only his greatest poetical effort, which it already is, but the greatest of this century. New England Provincial Life and History. 175 ART. VIII.-1. House of the Seven Gables. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. London: G. Routledge and Co. 2. Mosses from an Old Manse. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. London: G. Routledge and Co. 3. Twice Told Tales. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. London: H. Bohn. 4. Courtship of Miles Standish, and other Poems. By H. M. LONGFELLOW. London: W. Kent and Co. CAPTAIN GOSWOLD found Martha's vineyard "replenished with the blossoms of strawberries and raspberries, with cranes and hernes, and courteous salvages;" but, "by reason of some occult and secret accident, known by experience to partake a little too much of the two extremes of heat and cold;" the latter, however, cleansing the air's lower chambers, "and the earth as to its fruitfulness being such beholding to the summer's heat, and the influence of celestial planets." To the English fancy, this somewhat stormy land of refuge appears now sterner and drearier than it really is. Few English tourists examine the country at all; and we are told, that so late as 1796, an American travelling through it for curiosity was a marvel. Judging from the barren meagreness of more recent tours and American handbooks, we should conceive he would be so still. New England scenery, though not very striking, is of a domestic picturesque character. Everywhere rise up lichen-covered rocks, partially covered with the native forest, or boulders of bare gneiss bordering the level and fertile plain. Now you come upon swamps fringed with red cedars; now on one of the multitudinous, glittering New England lochs and burns, each impressing us, writes President Dwight, "as a delightful morning in spring." Then again appear stretches of aboriginal forest, great groves of whispering white pines, birch, and oak, and sumach, and glorious maples, contrasting with what the same author terms the "cavern-like darkness of the massy green hemlock," and all gilded and vermilioned by the first breath of the summer of All-Saints. Interspersed are right white villages, shadowed with green trees. Down the broken forest-lands the waters, always pure and sweet, flow with unceasing rapidity; and the jungles, to the pleased surprise of emigrants, natives of our eastern counties, are ever dry and healthy. There are not many green lawns, or heaths, or great oaks, it is true; but the yellow tulip-tree and blush pink dogwood, and fragrant shadblossom illuminate the landscape; and every common has its glossy candleberry and sweet fern, golden rods and asters, and everlasting. Generally the hills are low grassy downs rather than mountains; but the clear northern atmosphere makes the crests of the White Mountains, pearl-like, or looming near before a storm, a continual presence within a circle of eighty or a hundred miles. Nations, when all their life and energies have been absorbed and tyrannised over by one special type of feeling, seem sometimes to have a capacity of throwing off an exact image of this, which no longer revolves in the same orbit, or undergoes the same developments with the state of which it is the product, but continues, in kind, though not in degree, ever after unchangeable. What was the result of a most radical revolution may manifest, subsequently, equally extreme conservatism. The story of the planting of the New England colonies breathes of the very essence of the most heroic chapter in English history. It reproduces the spirit which animated the efforts of its leaders, unadulterated by the occasional tone of intrigue and manoeuvring with which, whether with truth or falsehood, the art of the English Thucydides has overspread the narrative. Every now and then, one of the very actors in the great scene passes over the stage recalling the image, in a yet purer and nobler phase, of the principles for which he was soon to rise up as champion. The Bellinghams, and Dudleys, and Winthrops, were English all over, with the prejudices good, or narrow, as they might be, of English gentlemen and yeomen. The land they chose was barren, bleak, and cold, compared with the rich and balmy south; and the Virginian tobacco-planter might taunt them with the sugar, indigo, ginger, cotton, and the like, which the industry of their twenty thousand would have produced had they come thither, instead of selecting a region "so barren, that, except a herring be put into the hole that you set the corn or maize in, it will not come up." But rocky, varied Massachusetts was blown upon by the rough animating winds of England, and its sand dunes, and pools, and levels, reminded them of old homesteads amid the fens of Lincolnshire and Essex. Even English weeds loved the soil which was friendly to English grain. They were fugitives in the cause of religious liberty, and had no great reason to meditate with gratitude on their native rulers. They might have, in this remote region, practically ignored the existence of Privy Councils and Stuarts. But such a thought never entered their imaginations. They would be Englishmen in all points still; and, in the moment of departure, the leaders of the main body of emigrants put forth to the world a manifesto of but love and gratitude to the land and constitution which had indifferently cherished them. A forlorn hope for making the experiment of a settlement, was furnished by the congregation of Mr Robinson, that audacious personage who, a chronicle tells us, "at length arrived to that confidence, that he began to play with Dr Ames his name, styling him in one of his pamphlets 'Dr William Amiss."" They were tired of the fogs of Holland, and animated by Captain Goswold's report of the dry bracing air, as well as by a prediction of "Mr Brigges, that famous mathematician," as people then politely termed their Murphys and Moores, that "the disappearing of the blazing star in the west, in the year 1619, betokened the death of the natives in these parts through some notable event." It was in the cold and dreary month of December, after a tedious passage over "the vast and wide ocean," that the little company reached the shore, "to be entertained with no other sight than that of the withered grass on the surface of the cold earth, and the grim looks of savage enemies." They were comforted a little by "stumbling, through an accident, upon some baskets of Indian corn, which did, in some sort, resemble the grapes of Eshcol, more to the apprehension of faith than of sense." Miles Standish was captain of the Old Colony of Plymouth, "bred a soldier in the Low Countries, and very expert in things of that nature, though not at that time of their church." Pastor Robinson, indeed, seems to have been somewhat alarmed at the tales of the prowess of this mail-clad, fiery, little warrior, as shown in the slaying, with his own hand, of the naked Indian, brave Pecksuct; and to have written, in 1623, to his people, " to consider the disposition of their captain, who was of a severe temper. He doubted whether there was not wanting that tenderness of the life of man, made after God's image, which was meet,"-not, in this, thinking with President Dwight. Many were the marches and countermarches through the forest of him and his army, Twelve men all equipped, having each his rest and his matchlock, Eighteen shillings a month, together with diet and pillage. In memory of his ancestral hall in Lancashire, of which, they say, he had been unjustly deprived, he called his village Duxbury; though, according to another tradition, it got its name from his office of Dux. Perhaps it was an equivoque. There he hung up his sword and snaphance, the terror of the Indian tribes. from Massachusetts Bay to Martha's Vineyard, and Cape Cod to Narraganset, and married Barbara Standish,-faithless John Alden and fair Priscilla being his near neighbours. Under his colonelcy and the magistracy of Mr John Carver, the germs of law and civilisation were planted in New England. In September 1630, one Billington was executed for murder in the forest; and so the colony took firmly its root among nations. Soon beneath the brow of the great pine plain, overlooking the ocean, noble avenues of drooping elms were planted; and, beside VOL. XXXI. NO. LXI. M |