Page:The Dial vol. 15 (July 1 - December 16, 1893).djvu/52

 40  maps of the Texas and Mexican battles are found in the other volume; but a few good general maps, covering the whole field of military movements described, would add to the reader's interest and profit. The volumes are well indexed.

 

It seems odd to begin an article upon "Recent Books of Poetry" with a paragraph devoted to "Poems by Two Brothers." That modest collection of youthful exercises in verse, now reproduced (as to title-page and arrangement) in fac-simile, is mainly useful in enabling us to realize the immense range of the conquests of Victorian Poetry. The year of its publication (1827 ) was also that of the appearance of Pollok's "Course of Time," marking the lowest ebb of the tide of dull eighteenth-century didacticism. Meanwhile, the romantic movement had swelled to its height, and its force was fast becoming spent. But who could have discerned, in the volume almost furtively put forth by three English schoolboys (for Mr. Frederick Tennyson wrote at least four of the poems), the first wave of a new tide of song, about to gather to itself the best impulses of both the didactic and romantic spirits, to unite them in one resistless surge, and destined to sweep down the century almost to its very close. Even now, when judgment can hardly avoid the influence of the accomplished fact, it is difficult to find in this volume any suggestion, much less any promise, of what was to come. Here and there we find a faintly Tennysonian phrase, such as

or this:

or this:

But what we find for the most part are the platitudes of boyish rhetoric, and echoes of Byron or Moore. It is amusing to think that any work signed by Alfred Tennyson should deserve no better description than is given by the phrase, "an echo of Moore." Four pieces not included in the original edition are now first published from manuscript. They enrich English literature by such measures as this:

"Timbuctoo," the prize poem of 1829, which the publishers have also added to the collection, is a different matter. Here we can find our own Tennyson in many passages. The following has often been quoted, but is worth quoting again:

Indeed, the growth in power of poetic expression that is evidenced by these and many other lines of "Timbuctoo," when compared with the best of the "Poems by Two Brothers," is one of the most striking things in all the record of the development of poetical genius.

"King Poppy," a posthumous poem by the Earl of Lytton, was written nearly twenty years ago, and subjected, during the rest of the author's lifetime, to constant revision and improvement. It was the author's favorite work, and exhibits, at their highest stage of development, his considerable powers as a writer of philosophic and fanciful verse. In 1880, he wrote of the poem to this effect:

