The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1855-08-14 00:00:00

Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by
When the poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each sex,

like swine,
When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie ;
Peace in her vineyard—yes !—but a company forges the

wine.

And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head,
Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife,
While chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for

bread,
And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.
Anil Sleep must lie down arm'd, for the villanous centre-

Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights,
While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as

he sits
To pestle a poison'd poison behind his crimson lights.

When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,
And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones,
Is it peace or war P better, war ! loud war by land and by

sea,
War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred
thrones !

For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the
hill,
And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker
out of the foam,
That the smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue would leap from
his counter and till,
And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yard-
wand, home.

Mr. Tennyson seems to think that war is the
only agent which can effect a thorough purifica-
tion of the contaminated moral atmosphere, as
thunder clears the natural air, and a large portion
of his poem is devoted to a demonstration of this.
The tale itself is a very ingeniously worked though
simply contrived one. A young man left alone
in the world by the violent death of his father,
under circumstances which at least give room for
doubt as to whether his death were accidental or
not—if the latter, whether self-inflicted or death
by the hand of another. If this last were the
true solution, whether it was not through the in-
strumentality of one who was an associate in his
pecuniary speculations, and largely profited by
their derangement occasioned through his death ;
and who becomes the purchaser of the estates and
property which should have descended to the
dead man's son. The son becomes misanthropic
in his isolation, and it is he who moralises on the
world as we have just seen ; but he is awakened
to a sense of the beauty of virtue and the holi-
ness of love through a renewed intimacy with
Maud, the daughter of his deceased parent's
ancient though suspected friend, and now the
possessor of his property. Maud loves him in
return ; but she has a haughty and insolent bro-
ther, who insults her lover. A duel takes place
between the young men, in which the brother is
slain ; after which the lover flees, and only re-
turns to find that Maud is dead, and that he is
" once more a lone spirit in the world." He be-
comes delirious, but recovers. In his frenzy, he
has discovered the root of the evils that afflict
the world. He now enters the lists as a champion
to aid in the conflict against all tyranny and
wrong, in which latter capacity of course he
finds his .hands pretty well filled with work, of a
kind much more laborious than satisfactory.

That the poem is unequal is true, and that
some portions of it are only equal to what it was
once the fashion to expect from a Poet Laureate
is undeniable ; but it is not less true that there