tions of the time, some mannerisms and hyphened epithets, almost hid from them the extraordinary beauty of the verse; the youthful blemishes they pounced on and held up to ridicule. Not one of them recognised that Alfred Tennyson had struck a keynote that would echo down the years, and to which almost all succeeding poets of the century would attune their lyres. His son writes: "If I may venture to speak of his special influence over the world, my conviction is that its main and enduring factors are his power of expression, the perfection of his workmanship, his strong common-sense, the high purport of his life and work, his humility, and his open-hearted and helpful sympathy-Fortezza ed umilitade, e largo core! Among the first to make the Poems of 1830 known by favourable criticism were Sir John Bowring in the Westminster Review, Leigh Hunt in the Tatler, and Arthur Hallam in the Englishman's Magazine. Christopher North in Blackwood was hardly as hostile as might have been expected-' somewhat too skittish and petulant' Tennyson himself thought the notice; amidst boisterous assaults was something of real appreciation, practically shown by copious extracts. The stupidity and brutality of the Quarterly on the Poems of 1833 were generally condemned, and did not count with real lovers of poetry; but the criticism tended to check the poet's productiveness for years. Honour to whom honour is due. While England had as yet given her new poet but a hesitating welcome, America received his 1833 volume with open arms. The younger and more impulsive nation had been at once fascinated, and Tennyson's poetry was already in the hearts and on the lips of the best Americans while it was being damned with faint praise by the great majority of his own country men. But his triumph was sure if slow. His two volumes published in 1842 conquered his English world, and set him at once and for ever in his rightful place. Locksley Hall was perhaps the most popular of these poems. The poet himself always declared that one of his finest similes occurred here:

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might,

Smote the chord of Self that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

His humour, that afterwards reached its highwater mark in the Northern Farmers, the Northern Cobbler, and the Churchwarden and the Curate, began to show itself in a delightful form in Will Waterproof and The Talking Oak. The Lotoseaters is a wonderful example of exquisitely modulated verse and rich imagery. But it is difficult to select among such masterpieces as Recollections of the Arabian Nights, The Poet, The Sea-fairies, Love and Death, Oriana, The Lady of Shalott, Mariana, The Two Voices, The Sisters, The Palace of Art, The Dream of Fair Women, the poems on Freedom, the Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses, St Agnes Eve, Sir Galahad, The Lord of Burleigh; Dora,

an English idyll of a type which Tennyson invented; and, almost the most perfect of its kind, 'Break, break, break.'

Let it never be forgotten, as one of his chief glories, that Alfred Tennyson, even in the first flush and fervour of his young manhood, never wrote an unclean line; he treated the mysteries of love and passion with an exquisite reverence that was almost awe. And in the divinest thrill of that young love-poem, The Gardener's Daughter, he silenced himself almost suddenly :

Love with knit brows went by,

And with a flying finger touch'd my lips,
And spake 'Be wise not easily forgiven
Are those who, setting wide the doors that bar
The secret bridal chambers of the heart,
Let in the day.'

All his life Alfred Tennyson maintained that noble reticence, that reserved emotion, passionate as his poetic nature was; anything like impurity of expression was impossible to him, 'because his heart was pure.'

The Princess, 'the herald melody' of the higher education of women, appeared in 1847. 'The character of Ida,' wrote Coventry Patmore in the Edinburgh Review, 'who is "the very Ida of the intellect," seems to be intended to represent that of science, or the simple intellect, in the most exclusive and exalted form which it is capable of reaching by its own unaided efforts. In its rebellion against an exorbitant authority, it has fallen into the grievous mistake of refusing to recognise any authority at all. It is much in the right and much in the wrong; and has to undergo a disastrous course of error before it can be taught the knowledge of the truth.' Some of the blank verse in this poem is among the best Tennyson ever wrote-such passages as :

Not peace she look'd-the Head: but rising up
Robed in the long night of her deep hair, so
To the open window moved, remaining there
Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves
Of tempest, when the crimson-rolling eye
Glares ruin, and the wild birds on the light
Dash themselves dead. She stretch'd her arms and call'd
Across the tumult and the tumult fell.

And every one knows the beautiful lyrics, 'The Splendour falls,' 'Ask me no more,' and 'Tears, idle tears.'

The most important poems in Tennyson's lifework were In Memoriam and the epic Idylls of the King; both of them works that helped to give back faith in God and Immortality to many of his generation in a time of doubt and scepticism. In Memoriam, though not published till 1850, was begun directly after the death of his beloved friend Hallam, and continued, section by section, through succeeding years. We cannot doubt that the loss of this dearest 'first friendship' greatly contributed to the development of Alfred Tennyson's genius. It might never,

perhaps, have attained to its ultimate splendour but for that bitter awakening from the happy poetic dreams of personal inexperience. He 'built up all his sorrow with his song,' and the poet was built up at the same time, coming to his full stature in the throes of that abiding pain. Professor Palgrave has spoken of In Memoriam as 'that elegiac treasury in which the poet has stored the grief and meditation of many years after his friend's death; a series of lyrics which in pathos, melody, range of thought, and depth of feeling may stand with the Canzoniere of Petrarch and the Sonnets of Shakespeare.'

Maud (1855) gave to the personal lyric its deepest and widest extension. The first four of the twelve Idylls of the King appeared in 1859. This most important--for some critics his greatest -work was completed in 1870, 1872, and 1885. The story of the old Celtic hero, Christianised ere Malory took it up, is here 'interfused with the vital atmosphere of the Victorian era,'' shadowing Sense at war with Soul.' In Memoriam had greatly raised the poet's reputation; Maud, although a favourite with Tennyson himself, met with a good deal of uncomplimentary criticism; but the first Idylls (1859) won the heartiest recognition from critics of the most various schools, and secured for Tennyson the unique position and popularity he thenceforward enjoyed throughout the English-speaking world. In 1850 his standing in the realm of poetry was marked by his appointment to be successor to Wordsworth, the greatest poet of the second half of the century succeeding the great creative poet of the first half.

In June 1850 he married Emily Sellwood. It was a boy and girl attachment, but circumstances long deferred their union, an extraordinarily happy

one.

She was his true helpmate, his complement, the one thing needful to make his life a whole. They settled at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, three years after their marriage, and Farringford became the ideal home of a poet. Here he lived with his wife and his boys, Hallam and Lionel, in ever-growing happiness, fame, and prosperity. And here, in the library he added to his house, in the lovely lawns of his garden, or pacing his noble down,' with the lark's song far over his head and the breaking seas far below his feet for sole accompaniment, he composed some of his favourite poems, Maud, The Idylls of the King, Enoch Arden, Queen Mary, and many another idyll, lyric, and drama. And here as time went on his friends gathered round him--the surviving friends of his youth; the friends of his middle age, of his advancing years; the unknown friends from distant lands who crossed the seas to pay their homage to him in his simple sylvan court.

The Arthurian romance, all but Balin and Balan, was completed in 1869; in Dean Alford's words, 'a great connected poem dealing with the very highest interests of man,' King Arthur being typical of the higher soul of man. Tennyson

was fondest of reading aloud Guinevere and The Passing of Arthur.

In 1869 he built his new house, Aldworth, at Haslemere, where until the end of his life he always passed the summer; and here he wrote a considerable part of his later plays, Harold (1877), The Falcon (1879), The Cup (1881), The Promise of May (1882), Becket (1884). Both Becket and The Cup, under Mr (afterwards Sir Henry) Irving's management, were very successful on the stage. Of Becket Sir Henry Irving wrote to the present Lord Tennyson: 'We have passed the fiftieth performance of Becket, which is in the heyday of its success. I think that I may, without hereafter being credited with any inferior motive, give again the opinion which I previously expressed to your loved and honoured father. To me Becket is a very noble play, with something of that lofty feeling and that far-reaching influence which belong to a passion-play. There are in it moments of passion and pathos which are the aim and end of dramatic art, and which, when they exist, atone to an audience for the endurance of long Some of the scenes and passages, especially in the last act, are full of sublime feeling, and are, with regard to both their dramatic effectiveness and their poetic beauty, as fine as anything in our language. I know that such a play has an ennobling influence on both the audience who see it and the actors who play in it.'

acts.

Other volumes were The Lover's Tale (1879), Ballads (1880), Tiresias (1885), Locksley HallSixty Years After (1886), Demeter (1889), The Death of Enone, Akbar, and other pieces (1892). The later volumes show a mature and perfect art, and a range wide enough to include history—mostly English, as in the splendid Ballad of the Revenge; tales in dialect-that chiefly of Lincolnshire; a few beautiful classical pieces; narratives, idyllic and lyrical, of the profoundest pathos; and poems treating great problems in religion and morality, philosophy and science.

Tennyson's keen and abiding interest in religious and ethical problems is shown throughout his work; his fervid patriotism was conspicuous at all times, and he took his side unhesitatingly in the great political issues of the day. Long before colonial federation was a popular subject, he was amazed that England could not see that 'her true policy lies in a close union with our colonies.' In his personal friendships, as in his literary tastes, he was unusually catholic. Amongst his friends he ranked Carlyle as well as Gladstone, and Huxley as well as Ruskin. He loved to read aloud Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer; he reverenced Wordsworth; said that Keats, if he had lived, 'would have been among the very greatest of us;' thought Goethe among the wisest of mankind as well as a great artist; and in his friend Browning recognised a mighty intellect, though he seldom attempts the marriage of sense with sound.' Shakespeare was his constant study till on his

In a

deathbed the power to read failed him. Cyclopædia of English Literature it is appropriate to record that the most perfect master of musical English verse thought the stateliest English prose was, after the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, that of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, De Quincey, and Ruskin, with some of Sir Thomas Browne.

He enjoyed travel; thus he made short journeys to the Pyrenees in 1831 and 1861, and, between 1853 and 1892, to the Western Highlands, Staffa, and Iona, Portugal, Cornwall, Derbyshire and Yorkshire, Weimar and Dresden, Dartmoor and Salcombe, North Wales, Suffolk, Ireland, Stonehenge, Venice, Verona, and the Italian lakes, Dovedale, and sea-trips to Orkney, Norway, and Denmark, and the Channel Islands.

In January 1884 Queen Victoria created Tennyson a peer of the United Kingdom, and the poetlaureate became Baron Tennyson of Freshwater and Aldworth. It was in April 1886 that his younger son Lionel died as he was returning from India, a young man of high promise, his life too early quenched by untimely death-'a grief as deep as Life or Thought.' After 1887 the poetpeer suffered attack upon attack of illness, until the last illness which ended in his death at Aldworth on the 6th October 1892, in his eighty-fourth year. At Aldworth, too, his widow passed away, in her eighty-fourth year, on the 10th August 1896. June Bracken and Heather, quoted below, was the last poem written to her. The nation buried its great poet in Westminster Abbey his wife lies in the God's acre of that island village where, as she had herself said, they spent their happiest days. On the tablet to his father's memory in Freshwater Church, the inscription ends with these fine lines by the present Lord Tennyson : Speak, living Voice! to thee death is not death; Thy life outlives the life of dust and breath.

The Bridal-after reading the 'Bride of Lammermoor.'

The lamps were bright and gay

On the merry bridal-day,

When the merry bridegroom
Bore the bride away!

A merry, merry bridal,
A merry bridal-day!
And the chapel's vaulted gloom
Was misted with perfume.
'Now, tell me, mother, pray,
Why the bride is white as clay,
Although the merry bridegroom
Bears the bride away,

On a merry, merry bridal,

A merry bridal day?

And why her black eyes burn
With a light so wild and stern?'

In the hall, at close of day,

Did the people dance and play,
For now the merry bridegroom

Hath borne the bride away.

...

He from the dance hath gone,

But the revel still goes on. Then a scream of wild dismay Thro' the deep hall forced its way, Altho' the merry bridegroom Hath borne the bride away; And, staring as in trance,

They were shaken from the dance.Then they found him where he lay Whom the wedded wife did slay, Tho' he a merry bridegroom

Had borne the bride away, And they saw her standing by, With a laughing crazed eye, On the bitter, bitter bridal, The bitter bridal-day.

(Written in boyhood.)

'And all that from the town would stroll,

Till that wild wind made work In which the gloomy brewer's soul

Went by me, like a stork

'The slight she-slips of loyal blood,

And others, passing praise,
Strait-laced, but all-too-full in bud
For puritanic stays:

'And I have shadow'd many a group
Of beauties, that were born
In teacup-times of hood and hoop,
Or while the patch was worn;

'And, leg and arm with love-knots gay, About me leap'd and laugh'd

The modish Cupid of the day,

And shrill'd his tinsel shaft.

'I swear (and else may insects prick Each leaf into a gall)

This girl, for whom your heart is sick, Is three times worth them all;

'For those and theirs, by Nature's law,
Have faded long ago;

But in these latter springs I saw
Your own Olivia blow,

'From when she gamboll'd on the greens, A baby-germ, to when

The maiden blossoms of her teens
Could number five from ten.

'I swear, by leaf, and wind, and rain, (And hear me with thine ears,) That tho' I circle in the grain

Five hundred rings of years

'Yet, since I first could cast a shade,
Did never creature pass
So slightly, musically made,
So light upon the grass :

'For as to fairies, that will flit To make the greensward fresh, I hold them exquisitely knit,

But far too spare of flesh.'

Oh, hide thy knotted knees in fern,
And overlook the chace;

And from thy topmost branch discern
The roofs of Sumner-place.

But thou, whereon I carved her name,
That oft hast heard my vows,
Declare when last Olivia came

To sport beneath thy boughs.

'And here she came, and round me play'd, And sang to me the whole

Of those three stanzas that you made
About my "giant bole;'

And in a fit of frolic mirth

She strove to span my waist :
Alas, I was so broad of girth,
I could not be embraced.

'I wish'd myself the fair young beech
That here beside me stands,
That round me, clasping each in each,
She might have lock'd her hands.

'Yet seem'd the pressure thrice as sweet As woodbine's fragile hold,

Or when I feel about my feet
The berried briony fold.'

O muffle round thy knees with fern,
And shadow Sumner-chace!
Long may thy topmost branch discern
The roofs of Sumner-place!

But tell me, did she read the name
I carved with many vows
When last with throbbing heart I came
To rest beneath thy boughs?

'O yes, she wander'd round and round These knotted knees of mine,

And found, and kiss'd the name she found, And sweetly murmur'd thine.

'A teardrop trembled from its source, And down my surface crept.

My sense of touch is something coarse, But I believe she wept.

'Then flush'd her cheek with rosy light,
She glanced across the plain;
But not a creature was in sight:
She kiss'd me once again.

'Her kisses were so close and kind,
That, trust me on my word,
Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind,
And yet my sap was stirr'd:

'And even into my inmost ring

A pleasure I discern'd,

Like those blind motions of the Spring,
That show the year is turn'd.'.

May never saw dismember thee,
Nor wielded axe disjoint,
That art the fairest-spoken tree
From here to Lizard-point.

O rock upon thy towery top
All throats that gurgle sweet!
All starry culmination drop

Balm-dews to bathe thy feet!
All grass of silky feather grow-
And while he sinks or swells
The full south-breeze around thee blow
The sound of minster bells.

The fat earth feed thy branchy root, That under deeply strikes!

The northern morning o'er thee shoot,
High up, in silver spikes!

Nor ever lightning char thy grain,
But, rolling as in sleep,

Low thunders bring the mellow rain,

That makes thee broad and deep!

And hear me swear a solemn oath,

That only by thy side

Will I to Olive plight my troth,
And gain her for my bride.

From 'The Lotos-Eaters.'

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,
And dear the last embraces of our wives

And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change;
For surely now our household hearths are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes over-bold
Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings
Before them of the ten-years' war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.
Is there confusion in the little isle?

Let what is broken so remain.
The Gods are hard to reconcile :

'Tis hard to settle order once again.

There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,

Long labour unto aged breath,

Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly,

How sweet (while warm airs lull us blowing lowly)
With half-dropt eyelids still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly
His waters from the purple hill—

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine

To watch the emerald-colour'd water falling
Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine!

Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,

Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine.

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak :

The Lotos blows by every winding creek :

All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:
Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.

We have had enough of action, and of motion we, Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly
curl'd

Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful

song

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;

Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer-some, 'tis whisper'd—
down in hell

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and
oar;

Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

Break, Break, Break.

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play! O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.

Ida's Chant of Victory.

'Our enemies have fall'n, have fall'n: the seed,
The little seed they laugh'd at in the dark,
Has risen and cleft the soil, and grown a bulk
Of spanless girth, that lays on every side

A thousand arms and rushes to the Sun.

'Our enemies have fall'n, have fall'n: they came; The leaves were wet with women's tears: they heard A noise of songs they would not understand: They mark'd it with the red cross to the fall, And would have strown it, and are fall'n themselves.

Our enemies have fall'n, have fall'n: they came, The woodmen with their axes: lo the tree! But we will make it faggots for the hearth, And shape it plank and beam for roof and floor, And boats and bridges for the use of men.

'Our enemies have fall'n, have fall'n: they struck ;
With their own blows they hurt themselves, nor knew
There dwelt an iron nature in the grain :
The glittering axe was broken in their arms,
Their arms were shatter'd to the shoulder-blade.

'Our enemies have fall'n, but this shall grow
A night of Summer from the heat, a breadth
Of Autumn, dropping fruits of power; and roll'd
With music in the growing breeze of Time,
The tops shall strike from star to star, the fangs
Shall move the stony bases of the world.

'And now, O maids, behold our sanctuary
Is violate, our laws broken: fear we not
To break them more in their behoof, whose arms
Champion'd our cause and won it with a day