[1] In _The Keepsake_, “St. Agnes’ Eve”; in _The Tribute_, “Stanzas”: “Oh! that ’twere possible”. Between 1831 and 1832 he had contributed to _The Gem_ three, “No more,” “Anacreontics,” and “A Fragment”; in _The Englishman!s Magazine_, a Sonnet; in _The Yorkshire Literary Annual_, lines, “There are three things that fill my heart with sighs”; in _Friendship’s Offering_, lines, “Me my own fate”.
The poems of 1842 naturally divide themselves into seven groups:—
_Claribel_. _Lilian_. _Isabel_. _Madeline_. _A Spirit Haunts_. _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_. _Adeline_. _The Dying Swan_. _A Dream of Fair Women_. _The Sea-Fairies_. _The Deserted House_. _Love and Death_. _The Merman_. _The Mermaid_. _The Lady of Shalott_. _Eleanore_. _Margaret_. _The Death of the Old Year_. _St. Agnes._ _Sir Galahad_. _The Day Dream_. _Will Waterproof’s Monologue_. _Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_. _The Talking Oak_. _The Poet’s Song_.
_Mariana_. _Mariana in the South._ _Oriana_. _Fatima_. _The Sisters_. _Locksley Hall_. _Edward Gray_.
_A Character_. _The Poet_. _The Poet’s Mind_. _The Two Voices_. _The Palace of Art_. _The Vision of Sin_. _St. Simeon Stylites_.
_The Miller’s Daughter_. _The May Queen_. _Morte d’Arthur_. _The Gardener’s Daughter_. _Dora_. _Audley Court_. _Walking to the Mail_. _Edwin Morris_. _The Golden Year_.
_Oriana_. _Lady Clara Vere de Vere_. _Edward Gray_. _Lady Clare_. _The Lord of Burleigh_. _The Beggar Maid_.
_Ode to Memory_. _Sonnet to J. M. K_. _To—— with the Palace of Art_. _To J.S._ _Amphion_. _To E. L. on his Travels in Greece_. _To—— after reading a Life and Letters_. _“Come not when I am Dead_.” _A Farewell_. “_Move Eastward, Happy Earth_.” “_Break, Break, Break_.”
_“You ask me.”_ _“Of old sat Freedom.”_ _“Love thou thy Land.”_ _The Goose._
In surveying these poems two things must strike every one— their very wide range and their very fragmentary character. There is scarcely any side of life on which they do not touch, scarcely any phase of passion and emotion to which they do not give exquisite expression. Take the love poems: compare _Fatima_ with _Isabel_, _The Miller’s Daughter_ with _Locksley Hall_, _The Gardener’s Daughter_ with _Madeline_, or _Mariana_ with Cleopatra in the _Dream of Fair Women_. When did love find purer and nobler expression than in _Love and Duty?_ When has sorrow found utterance more perfect than in the verses _To J.S_., or the passion for the past than in _Break, Break, Break_, or revenge and jealousy than in _The Sisters?_ In _The Two Voices_, _The Palace of Art_ and _The Vision of Sin_ we are in another sphere. They are appeals to the soul of man on subjects of momentous concern to him. And each is a masterpiece. What is proper to philosophy and what is proper to poetry have never perhaps been so happily blended. They have all the sensuous charm of Keats, but the prose of Hume could not have presented the truths which they are designed to convey with more lucidity and precision. In that superb fragment the _Morte d’Arthur_ we have many of the noblest attributes of Epic poetry. _ënone_ is the perfection of the classical idyll, _The Gardener’s Daughter_ and the idylls that follow it of the romantic. _Sir Galahad_ and _St. Agnes_ are in the vein of Keats and Coleridge, but Keats and Coleridge have produced nothing more exquisite and nothing so ethereal. _The Lotos Eaters_ is perhaps the most purely delicious poem ever written, the _ne plus ultra_ of sensuous loveliness, and yet the poet who gave us that has given us also the political poems, poems as trenchant and austerely dignified in style as they are pregnant with practical wisdom. There is the same versatility displayed in the trifles.