Above the perilous seas of Change and Chance;
Nay, more, hold out the lights of cheerfulness;
As the tall ship, that many a dreary year
Knit to some dismal sandbank far at sea,
All thro' the livelong hours of utter dark,
Showers slanting light upon the dolorous wave."
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
