Where falls not rain, or hail, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard-lawns
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea.

Sir Bedivere is the last survivor of the knights of the Round Table the last representative of the old order of things. A new epoch is about to begin.

In the Gardener's Daughter, the hero relates how he wooed and won the gentle Rose. The poem abounds in beautiful descriptions of English scenery. In fact, it was written shortly after Tennyson had turned his back on the fens of Lincolnshire, and fixed his residence at Farringford in the Isle of Wight. "The fields dewyfresh, browsed by deep-uddered kine", are not common in Lincolnshire; where the eye more frequently rests on the "long gray fields", "the oat-grass and the swordgrass and the bulrush in the pool," or the "tangled water-courses" and "the willow over the river" of the May-Queen and his other early poems. At the end of the Gardener's Daughter, the narrator represents himself as a widower, and seated with his eyes fixed on the portrait of his lost wife:

Behold her there

As I beheld her ere she knew my heart,
My first, last love: the idol of my youth,
The darling of my manhood, and alas!

Now the most blessed memory of mine age.

In the Miller's Daughter, a husband recalls to his wife the history of their courtship and marriage, and repeats a song he had given her on her wedding-day : It is the miller's daughter,

And she is grown so dear, so dear,
That I would be the jewel

That trembles at her ear;

For hid in ringlets day and night,

I'd touch her neck so warm and white.

And I would be the girdle

About her dainty, dainty waist,

And her heart would beat against me,
In sorrow and in rest:

And I should know if it beat right,
I'd clasp it round so close and tight.

And I would be the necklace,

And all day long to fall and rise
Upon her balmy bosom,

With her laughter or her sighs,
And I would lie so light, so light,

I scarce should be unclasp'd at night.

Another of these early poems, the Brook, tells us of a lovers' quarrel and reconciliation, followed by emigration to Australia and return to England; while all this time the Brook, the work of the eternal God, still sweetly murmured its unchanging lay. We quote the verses that more immediately refer to the stream:

I come from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
By many a field and fallow,

And many a fairy foreland set

With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel.

And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel-covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

I skip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go.
But I go on for ever.

The Talking Oak is a graceful poem, with a somewhat fantastic subject. A lover converses with the oak on the charms of a certain Olivia, and the tree relates, with what rapture the lady, on visiting the park, had read her name carved on its trunk by the hand of the lover. Hereupon, the youth, who is likewise a poet, Vows he will make the tree no less famous than its historical brother oak,

Wherein the younger Charles abode
Till all the paths were dim;

And far below the Roundhead rode,
And humm'd a surly hymn.

For descriptive force, the last two lines are perhaps unrivalled.

Godiva is the well-known legend of Coventry. Her husband, the Lord of Mercia, having laid a very heavy tax upon the then poor town, Lady Godiva remonstrates with him; but he will only consent to rescind his resolution on terms which he believes she cannot accept:

She sought her lord, and found him where he stood
About the hall, among his dogs alone.

She told him of their tears,

And prayed him: "If they pay this tax, they starve."
Whereat he stared, replying, half amazed,

"You would not let your little finger ache

For such as these." "But I would die," said she.
He laughed, and swore by Peter and by Paul,
Then fillipped at the diamond in her ear:
"Oh ay, Oh ay, you talk!" "Alas!" she said,
"But prove me what it is I would not do."
And from a heart as rough as Esau's hand,

He answered: "Ride you naked through the town,
And I repeal it;" and nodding as in scorn,

He parted.

The lady takes him at his word. On learning this, the authorities of the town decree that

as they loved her well,

From then till noon no foot should pace the street,

No eye look down, she passing; but that all

Should keep within, door shut, and window barred.

This order being strictly obeyed by the citizens, Lady Godiva "rode forth, clothed on with chastity," through all the town, and back to the castle. Only one irreverent and inquisitive wight, the "Peeping Tom" of the popular legend, disobeyed the prohibition, and met with a signal punishment:

One low churl, compact of thankless earth,
The fatal byword of all years to come,

Boring a little auger-hole in fear,

Peeped; but his eyes, before they had their will,
Were shrivelled into darkness in his head,

And dropped before him. So the powers who wait
On noble deeds cancelled a sense misused.

None of Tennyson's poems has been more praised than Locksley Hall. It is the complaint of an unfortunate lover, who has first been encouraged, and then jilted, by his cousin Amy. Tennyson is fond of making his principal personages tell their own story. After dwelling upon the happy past, when "Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands;" when for him every thing was bright in nature, even the most uninviting landscape for Amy was there beside him he turns with bitterness of soul to the present, when every illusion is gone, and he exclaims: "O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!" Not only has Amy forsaken him, but she is "mated with a clown," one who regards her as "Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse." He continues:

Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof, In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof. Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall, Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall. Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep, To thy widowed marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep. Thou shalt hear the Never, never, whispered by the phantom years, And the song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears. And an eye shall vex thee looking ancient kindness on thy pain: Turn thee, turn thee, on thy pillow, get thee to thy rest again.

In his disappointment and despair, he forms several wild projects for the future. Among others, he proposes to wander:

On from island unto island at the gateways of the day; and there to seek a compensation for what he has lost in Europe:

I will take some savage woman; she shall rear my dusky race. But on reflexion he abandons this insensate scheme: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay; and he resolves to grieve no longer for the faithless Amy, but to go among his fellow-men, who have achieved great things, and yet consider "that which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do."