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is-yes, I can read now-it is the "Heart of think rightly, that we have some cause to be Mid Lothian," by the author of "Waverley" indignant. The great cause why modern -or, no, it is "Life in London, or the Adven- humour and modern sentimentalism repel us, tures of Corinthian Tom, Jeremiah Hawthorn, is that they are unwarrantably familiar. Now, and their friend Bob Logic," by Pierce Egan; Mr. Sterne, the Superfine Review thinks, was and it has pictures-oh! such funny pictures! a true sentimentalist, because he was above As he reads, there comes behind the boy, a man, all things a true gentleman. The flattering a dervish, in a black gown, like a woman, and inference is obvious; let us be thankful for an a black square cap, and he has a book in each elegant moralist watching over us, and learn, hand, and he seizes the boy who is reading the if not too old, to imitate his high-bred politepicture-book, and lays his head upon one of his ness and catch his unobtrusive grace. If we books, and smacks it with the other. The boy are unwarrantably familiar, we know who is makes faces, and so that picture disappears. not. If we repel by pertness, we know who Now the boy has grown bigger. He has got never does. If our language offends, we know on a black gown and cap, something like the whose is always modest. O pity! The vision dervish. He is at a table, with ever so many has disappeared off the silver, the images of bottles on it, and fruit, and tobacco; and other youth and the past are vanishing away! We young dervishes come in. They seem as if they who have lived before railways were made bewere singing. To them enters an old moollah; long to another world. In how many hours he takes down their names, and orders them could the Prince of Wales drive from Brighton all to go to bed. What is this? A carriage, to London, with a light carriage built with four beautiful horses all galloping-a man pressly, and relays of horses longing to gallop in red is blowing a trumpet. Many young men the next stage? Do you remember Sir Someare on the carriage-one of them is driving the body, the coachman of the Age, who took our horses. Surely they won't drive into that—? half-crown so affably? It was only yesterday; -ah! they have all disappeared. And now I but what a gulf between now and then! Then see one of the young men alone. He is walk- was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less ing in a street - a dark street presently a swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, light comes to a window. There is the shadow knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman of a lady who passes. He stands there till the legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, light goes out. Now he is in a room scribbling and so forth-all these belong to the old period. on a piece of paper, and kissing a miniature I will concede a halt in the midst of it, and every now and then. There seem to be lines allow that gunpowder and printing tended to each pretty much of a length. I can read modernize the world. But your railroad starts heart, smart, dart; Mary, fairy; Cupid, stupid; the new era, and we of a certain age belong true, you; and never mind what more. Bah! to the new time and the old one. We are of the it is bosh. Now see, he has got a gown on time of chivalry as well as the Black Prince1 again, and a wig of white hair on his head, and or Sir Walter Manny.2 We are of the age of he is sitting with other dervishes in a great steam. We have stepped out of the old world room full of them, and on a throne in the on to "Brunel's" vast deck, and across the middle is an old Sultan in scarlet, sitting be- waters ingens patet tellus. Towards what new fore a desk, and he wears a wig too-and the continent are we wending? to what new laws, young man gets up and speaks to him. And new manners, new politics, vast new expanses now what is here? He is in a room with ever of liberties unknown as yet, or only surmised? so many children, and the miniature hanging I used to know a man who had invented a up. Can it be a likeness of that woman who flying-machine. "Sir,' " he would say, "give is sitting before that copper urn with a silver vase in her hand, from which she is pouring hot liquor into cups? Was she ever a fairy? She is as fat as a hippopotamus now. He is sitting on a divan by the fire. He has a paper on his knees. Read the name. It is the Superfine Review. It inclines to think that Mr. Dickens is not a true gentleman, that Mr. Thackeray is not a true gentleman, and that when the one is pert and the other arch, we, the gentlemen of the Superfine Review, think, and

me but five hundred pounds, and I will make it. It is so simple of construction that I tremble daily lest some other person should light upon and patent my discovery." Perhaps faith was wanting; perhaps the five hundred pounds. He is dead, and somebody else must make the flying-machine. But that will only be a step

1 The son of Edward
III; hero of Poi-
tiers, 1356.

2 A soldier of Edward
III.

3 The steamship "Great Eastern." designed by 1. K. Brunel, 1858.

4 "A great world looms."

forward on the journey already begun since
we quitted the old world. There it lies on the
other side of yonder embankments. You young
folks have never seen it; and Waterloo5 is to
you no more than Agincourt, and George IV.
than Sardanapalus. We elderly people have
lived in that pre-railroad world, which has
passed into limbo and vanished from under us.
I tell you it was firm under our feet once, and
not long ago. They have raised those railroad
embankments up, and shut off the old world
that was behind them. Climb up that bank on
which the irons are laid, and look to the other
side-it is gone.
There is no other side. Try
and catch yesterday. Where is it? Here is a
Times newspaper, dated Monday 26th, and this
is Tuesday 27th. Suppose you deny there was
such a day as yesterday.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892)

THE LADY OF SHALOTT*

PART I

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by

To many-tower'd Camelot;1
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,

The island of Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro' the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.

Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.

By the margin, willow-veil 'd,
Slide the heavy barges trail'd
By slow horses; and unhail'd
The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd

Skimming down to Camelot;
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?

We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark. The children will gather round and say to us patriarchs, Four gray walls, and four gray towers, "Tell us, grandpapa, about the old world.' And we shall mumble our old stories; and we shall drop off one by one; and there will be fewer and fewer of us, and these very old and feeble. There will be but ten pre-railroadites left; then three-then two-then one-then O! If the hippopotamus had the least sensibility (of which I cannot trace any signs either in his hide or his face), I think he would go down to the bottom of his tank, and never come up again. Does he not see that he belongs to bygone ages, and that his great hulking barrel of a body is out of place in these times? What has he in common with the brisk young life surrounding him? In the watches of the night, when the keepers are asleep, when the birds are on one leg, when even the little armadillo is quiet, and the monkeys have ceased their chatter,―he, I mean the hippopotamus, and the elephant, and the long-necked giraffe, perhaps may lay their heads together and have a colloquy about the great silent antediluvian world which they remember, where mighty monsters floundered through the ooze, crocodiles basked on the banks, and dragons darted out of the caves and waters before men were made to slay

E them. We who lived before railroads are antediluvians-we must pass away. We are grow ing scarcer every day; and old-old-very old relics of the times when George was still fightsing the Dragon.

Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,

Down to tower'd Camelot;
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers ""T is the fairy
Lady of Shalott.'

PART II

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.

10

20

30

40

1 The place of Arthur's court.
* This is, with some variations, essentially the
story of Elaine, "the lily maid of Astolat,'
which is told at greater length and with more
fidelity in the Idylls of the King. It is Tenny-
son's earliest venture into the Arthurian field.

Hither came at noon

140 Mournful Enone, wandering forlorn
Of Paris, once her playmate on the hills.
Her cheek had lost the rose, and round her neck
Floated her hair or seem'd to float in rest.
She, leaning on a fragment twined with vine,
Sang to the stillness, till the mountain-shade 20
Sloped downward to her seat from the upper
cliff.

"O mother Ida, many fountain 'd Ida,
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
150 For now the noonday quiet holds the hill;
The grasshopper is silent in the grass;
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead.
The purple flower droops, the golden bee
Is lily-cradled: I alone awake.

My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love, 30
My heart is breaking and my eyes are dim,
And I am all aweary of my life.

"O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida,
160 Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
Hear me, O earth, hear me, O hills, O caves
That house the cold crown'd snake! O moun-
tain brooks,

170

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.
The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,
Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to
pine,

And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand
The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down
Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars
The long brook falling thro' the cloven ravine
In cataract after cataract to the sea.
Behind the valley topmost Gargarus

10

eyes

Stands up and takes the morning; but in front I sat alone; white-breasted like a star

The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal
Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel,
The crown of Troas.

Fronting the dawn he moved; a leopard skin
Droop'd from his shoulder, but his sunny hair
Cluster'd about his temples like a God's;
And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow
brightens

60

*Enone, a nymph of Mt. Ida in the Troad, early the beloved of the shepherd Paris, mourns his desertion of her, and relates the story of the famous "Judgment of Paris" which led to the † According to a legend in Ovid, the walls of Troy Trojan war. rose to the music of Apollo's lyre.

When the wind blows the foam, and all my | And o'er him flow'd a golden cloud, and lean'd
heart
Upon him, slowly dropping fragrant dew.
Went forth to embrace him coming ere he came. Then first I heard the voice of her to whom

Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind in- Or labour'd mine undrainable of ore.

Honour,' she said, 'and homage, tax and toll, "For the most fair," would seem to award it From many an inland town and haven large,