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With all the blemishes arising from immaturity, "The Lover's Tale" is a work of indubitable genius and promise. In its wealth and exuberance of imagery, in the intensity of the speaker's emotion, as well as in those defects of which the author seems at a very early age to have become sensible, it reminds us forcibly of Robert Browning's first poem, "Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession," a blank-verse poem of about similar length, written at about the same age, and published, by a curious coincidence, in the same year.

In the copy of Tennyson's "Poems, chiefly Lyrical" (1830), in the Dyce Collection at the South Kensington Museum, is written on the title, "Robert Southey, 27 July, 1830, Keswick, from James Spedding."

In the copy of Tennyson's "Poems," 1833, in the