The Sun.
London, England, 1855-08-27 00:00:00

/7`.:7 " exprisite face," and hears her voice in the
meadow, and sees—
" . the treasured splendour her hand,
Come sliding out of her sacred glove,
And the sunlight break from her lips,"
As he recalls to remembrance—
" Whom but Maud should I meet
Last night, when the sunset burned
On the blossomed gable-ends
At the head of the village street,
Whom but Maud should I meet ?'
) And she touched my hand with a smile so sweet,
She made me divine amends
For a courtesy not returned."
He is conquered—her slave—her worshipper
" Her lion rolled in a silken net"—
" Lord of the pulse that is lord of her breast,
And dreams of her beauty with tender dread,
From. the delicate Arab arch of her feet
7o the grace that bright and light as the crest
Of a peacock, sits on her shining head,
And she knows it not : 0, if she knew it,
To know her beauty might half undo it."
It is the most sweet and exquisite picture in the
volume—suggestive of limnings tinted with the de-
licate water dyes of Edward Corbould, in illustra-
tion. The dreaming lover, although despised by
the relatives of Maud, is accepted by Maud her-
self. He saunters with her under the shadow of
twilight through her " high Hall-garden," as
though he trod the golden gravel and perfumed
lawns of Paradise. He sits over against her in the
village church—more her votary almost than God's.
lie has a chance meeting with her a mile from the
shore on horseback, where the waving of her hand as
she flits by him is as a star-spark in the darkness.
When he first wins her word of betrothal he never
tires of repeating to himself as it were in an under-
tone of rapture—
" There is none like her, none."
Sighing to her with an almost childish iteration of
tender epithets after their trysting pledge of mu-
tual fondness—
" My bride to be, my evermore delight,
My own heart's heart, and ownest own farewell."
His passion breaks forth in musical numbers, num-
bers " most musical, most melancholy," snatches
of erotic verse beginning, one of them—
" A voice by the cedar tree, &c."
Another—

" Go not, happy day," &c.

Another—

" Come into the garieri, Maud, &e."

And perhaps the most impassioned—

" I have led her home, my love, my only friend."
Tenderest of all, however, to our thinking, section
xii. :

" Birds in the high Hairigarden
When Twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.
I kissed her slender hand,
She took the kiss sedately ;
Maud is not seventeen,
But she is tall and stately.
Birds in the high Hall-garden
Were crying and calling to her,
Where is Maud, Maud, Maud,

One is come to woo her ?
Look, a horse is at the door,
And little King Charles is snarling,
Go back, my lord, across the moor,
You are not her darling."
This refers, of course, to the partially favoured
suitor, the suitor favoured by the Sultan, Maud's
brother :

"a lord, a captain, a padded shape,
A bought commission, a waxen face,
A rabbit mouth that is ever a-gape."
It is in this twelfth section of the poem from which
we have extracted these exultant ejaculations
that the poet sings with an unconscious remem-
brance of rare old Ben Jonson, who had carolled
thus exquisitely three centuries back (we have to
thank our weekly illustrated contemporary for the
reminiscence) :

" Here she was wont to go ! and here ! and hers !

Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow ;
The world may find the spring by following her,
.For other print her airy steps ne'er left.
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk.
But like the soft west wind she shot along,
And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sown them with her odorous foot."

It is, we say, with a possibly unconscious recollec-
tion of these delicious verses of Bon Jonson, and
perhaps also with a no less unthinking remembrance
of that almost equally delicious fancy of Walter
Scott—

E'en the slight harebell raised its head
Elastic from her airy tread :"
that Alfred Tennyson sings thus at page 42, of his
peerless Maud—
"l know the way she went
Home with her maiden posy,
For her feet have touched the meadows,
And left the daisies rosy :"
as in a kindred strain he afterwards sings at page
69 •

" From the meadow your walks have left so sweet,
Teat wherever a March-wind sighs
He sets the jewel print of your feet
In violets blue as your eyes."
All this rapturous love is blurred and dashed to
the dust, however, by a sudden blow struck at the
betrothed of Maud by the hand of her brother, fol-
lowed by a duel iu " the red-ribbed hollow behind
the wood," when the Sultan is killed—an event driv-
ing Maud into an early grave, her betrothed to a
hurried self-exile in Brittany, subsequently into a
mad-house on his return homewards, and ulti-
mately, on his return to reason, into a morbid kind
of vague cosmopolitan philanthropy. Behold, in
these few incidents, the gist of the plot of Maud—
a love story in verse, told through the errant man-
nerisms, and varying measures, and alternating
moods, the peculiarities of which the reader of our
remarks may now very readily conjecture through
the medium of the foregoing illustrative fragments
introduced here by way of explanatory quotation.
In conception, as in execution, the poem
is altogether too incoherent to be ranked
otherwise than very low indeed among the laureate's
now rather numerous metrical performances. We
cannot but regret when we hear a voice so strangely
melodious by nature jarring into such dissonant
colloquialisms as those which grate upon our senses
when we listen to a rhyming babble about
"perky larches and pines," or about peaks of the
wood " caught and euff'd by the gale," or heark-
ening to affected diminutives like "the least little
touch of spleen," diminutives kindred in character
to that senseless superlative at which we have
already directed a passing glance of (it may be cap-
tious) observation. The philosophic purpose of the
poem, for such a purpose, notwithstanding its ge-
neral incoherence, it appears to us to evidence
throughout, may be recognised, we cannot but
conjecture, clearly enough, through the thought
thus curiously expressed—

" As nine months go to shaping an infant ripe for his
birth,
So many a million of ages have gone to the making of
man :"

followed some time afterwards by that forceful
ejaculation, the reason of which, particularly at
this all-important juncture in our national desti-
nies, but few amongst us can fail to consider—
" Ah God, for a man with heart,lhead, hand,
Like some of the simple great ones gone
For ever and ever by,
One still strong man in a blatant livid,
Whatever they call him, what care I,
Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat—one
Who can rule and dare not lie."
A chief-of-men for the men of England, such as our
Imperial ally, the Third Napoleon, is at this mo-
ment for more than thirty-five millions of French-
men. Passing on, however, at last from the con-
sideration of " Maud" exclusively, we may com-
mend (in spite of occasional freaks of fancy, such
as that ludicrously quaint conceit about grass-
hoppers, in which they are spoken of as—
' " High-elbow'd grip that leap in summer grass):"
we may commend for an exceeding grace, and
sometimes for a bewitching tenderness that Idyl of
" The Brook," the refrain of which is merely the
repetition of one familiar, years ago, to the lovers
of the lyrics of Tennyson—
' " But not by thee, by steps shall be
For ever and for ever."
The jewel, the flower, the glory of the little book,
howbeit, to our mind is discoverable in the six
stanzas comprised between pp. 115 and 118, en-
titled, simply enough, "The Letters." It is the
only portion of the work, we conceive, in any way
worthy of the Poet Laureate. And it is such,
briefly, as a snatch of song, throbbing with pas-
sion, full of grace and tenderness and melody.
Not thus is it with the five remaining pieces, to us
mere scraps of indifferently meritorious versifica-
tion. A hunchback bedizened with jewels—pearl,
and topaz, and amethyst, and beryl, and onyx, and
malachite, adorning his "little dorsal irregularity "
—might be regarded, indeed, as the not wholly inapt
symbol or incarnation of a book as distorted in
structure, as stunted in dimensions, as it has been
laboriously overladen, here and there, with the
rarest and loveliest, but, at the same time, the
most bizarre and incongruous of decorations.

Morednn : A Tale of the Twelve Hundred and
Ten. By W. S. 3 vols. Sampson, Low, and
Son.
Another of the Curiosities of Literature ! And,
as such, assuredly entitled to at least some passing
consideration. Imagine a fiction in three volumes
assuming to itself the glory of having emanated
from the hand of Sir Walter Scott, coming from
the press at any time, in any shape, under any