apply himself to the rounded work, he had more of a disposition to teach, and less of that imaginative reach which is like belief; and now he is telling a story again for the sake of the story, but without the deeper meaning.  Lynette is a supercilious damsel who asks redress of the knights of the Round Table:  Gareth, a male Cinderella, starts from the kitchen to defend her, and after conquering her prejudices by his bravery, assumes his place as a disguised prince.  It is a plain little comedy, not much in Tennyson’s line:  there are places where he tries to imitate the artless disconnected speech of youth; and here, as with the little nun’s babble in Guinevere, and with some other passages of factitious simplicity, the poet makes rather queer work: 

  Gold? said I gold?—­ay then, why he, or she,
  Or whosoe’er it was, or half the world,
  Had ventured—­had the thing I spake of been
  Mere gold—­but this was all of that true steel
  Whereof they forged the brand Excalibur,
  And lightnings played about it in the storm, etc.

It may be questioned whether hap-hazard talk ever, in any age of human speech, took a form like that, though it is just like Tennyson in many a weary part of his poetry.  The blank verse, for its part, is broken with all the old skill, and there are lines of beautiful license, like this: 

  Camelot, a city of shadowy palaces,

or strengthened with the extra quantity, like this: 

  Stay, felon knight, I avenge me for my friend!

or imitating the motion described, as these: 

  The hoof of his horse slept in the stream, the stream
  Descended, and the Sun was washed away;

but occasionally the effort to give variety leads into mere puzzles and disagreeable fractures of metre, such as the following quatrain: 

  Courteous or bestial from the moment,
  Such as have nor law nor king; and three of these
  Proud in their fantasy, call themselves the Day,
  Morning-Star, and Noon-Sun, and Evening-Star.

The first line in this quotation, if it be not a misprint of the American edition, can only be brought to any kind of rule by accenting each polysyllable on the last, and is not, when even that is done, a pleasant piece of caprice.  There are plenty of phrases that shock the attention sufficiently to keep it from stagnating on the smooth surface of the verse; such are—­“ever-highering eagle-circles,” “there were none but few goodlier than he,” “tipt with trenchant steel,” and the expression, already famous, of “tip-tilted” for Lynette’s nose; to which may be added the object of Gareth’s attention, mentioned in the third line of the poem, when he “stared at the spate.”  But in the matter of descriptive power we do not know that the Laureate has succeeded better for a long time past in his touches of landscape-painting:  the pictures of halls, castles, rivers and woods are all felicitous.  For example, this in five lines, where the travelers saw