the soul, thus elevating it. At every fresh reading, delight and calm satisfaction in it augment. The chastening atmosphere of the poetic world masters all. A quiet joy predominates.

We speak of the volume as a poem. Such it is, distinctively, though made up of

'Short swallow flights of song, that dip

Their wings in tears and skim away.'

It is an ordered series. Each member conducts to another, and blends with it. An organic unity informs the whole; unity of feeling and of interest. In its growth, the child of actual experience, of a special epoch of the poet's life, it has a corresponding poetic consistency of structure, and spontaneous completeness. Each feature has a relevance born of natural emotion. It is the history of a grief, in all its bearings; to the past, the future, to the poet's being, and that of him he mourns. In the largeness of the sorrow, on its wide poetic reflex, we see these two noble figures defined.

The imaginative woe,

That loved to handle spiritual strife,'

and thus diffused the shock through all his life,' introduces us to a world, at once ideal and real; of thought, of aspiration; of objective beauty, such as spontaneously springs to the poet's footstep in traversing the realms of deep and searching experience. This form the loving commemoration naturally took: a record of after life. In the hands of Tennyson, it as naturally assumed breadth of range and varying beauty. No otherwise could so noble a suggestion of the one lost have been given, so rich a shrine raised, to consecrate him through Time. Beyond the deeply stirred poet's being, rises glorified and enlarged that of the friend.

It is a poem, and distinctively an elegiac one, in spirit as in form; while also idyllic and thoughtful. Each piece has more or less this bearing-is either tempered by, or born of, serious feeling. It is elegy wondrously enlarged. Not less truly does. it consecrate a memory, because something more than lament; because so full, self-completing; comprising much of all highest in thought, feeling, imagination.

In consonance with its unity, the poem has an essential beginning, middle, and end. At first, the hushed voice, the stunned soul, open in 'low beginnings,' half-stifled cries. To these succeed a gathering brooding over grief; with flutterings to and fro, imaginative scepticisms of loss, hovering tenderness over the final rites, the transport from a foreign shore to where,

'from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land.'

Then, come yearnings toward the fair time, idealized amid the irrevocable past, the youthful time when

'Not a leaf was dumb,

But all the lavish hills would hum,

The murmur of happy Pan.'

They yield to deeper moods; confrontings of the future questionings, the fruitless endeavour appointed for all earnest souls in the hour of deprivation, to realize the unrealizable, to see as without eyes, to know those things we cannot know'

For knowledge is of things we see.'

With these, follow yearnings towards the eternal, chill fears of separation even there; now a consoling fancy, now a bright wandering dream; then, wilder, bitter notes,' faltering steps, and darkening 'dimmer eyes:' all self-answered Last dawns the 'firmer mind;' serener onward-lookings, beginnings of content; with fair imaginings, fresh pictures from the past, and of that chief figure its central spirit,-all he was, and all the glow' To which his crescent would have grown.'

6

More and more

The glory of the sum of things

Will flash along the chords and go;'

mixed still with aspirations to the infinite; maturing into holier calm, clearer hearing of the deeper voice across the storm.' The song swells into fuller music, brighter hope, a nobler leave.' The voice deepens into firmer trust and truer tones. The eyes see clearer now, what is, and no man understands,' 'the hands' that 'out of darkness'

'reach, through Nature, moulding men.'

Love grows vaster passion;' its place is changed '-itself the same, and more, though now regret is dead.' The poet dreams a dream of good,' and mingles all the world' with him 'far off,' but ever nigh.'

6

Such is the scope of the poem; thus wide, and deep, and earnest. May we not well say, it speaks for many; that the poet represents them, in his own noble manner? We give no lengthened examples. Such have been supplied elsewhere. A few scattered notes alone, of the poet's melody, we adopt, to leaven the monotony of our own version.

With the elegiac and speculative burthen, is interspersed much purely poetic beauty, shedding light on the rest. Familiar inci

dent marks the progress of time and of the sorrow. The outward world and its relations to the poet are thus represented. Each

year's renewal of Christmas-tide and its household rites, darkened, then deepened by serious thought, are commemorated; the anniversaries of loss, and of the dear friend's birth; last, the poet's severance from his early home, from

Meadows breathing of the past,

And woodlands holy to the dead.'

Another golden thread runs through the poem; in the objectively imaginative breaks of light; the ideal analogies to itself, the creative sorrow realizes, in familiar life. These are exquisite in feeling, still more exquisitely wrought; of entire simplicity, eloquent of a spirit of sympathy with humanity.

More than once, a penetrating poet's glance is turned on this age itself. A calmly attuned voice is raised in testimony to

'The mighty hopes that make us men :'

a voice of large trust, of deep-seated faith, of long prophecy; singing of that 'crowning race,' the 'flower and fruit' of that, in us the seed. This tendency is one of Tennyson's prominent characteristics.

The commemoration of a bridal having intimate connexion with the preceding elegy, forms the conclusion to the volume; pathetic in its tenderness, its beauty and truth; yet serenely cheerful in its power. A marriage lay it is, such as Tennyson alone could write. The real is steeped in the ideal of poetry. A noble sincerity of poetic speech, poetry bending like the blue sky' over all, is blended with an exquisite refinement of feeling. High earnestness is tempered by the informing subtilty of imagination,-imaginative thought, imaginative word. Written not many years since, it is a connecting link between earlier time and the Tennyson of the present; partaking much of the chastened mastery of the volume of 1842. The prelude to In Memoriam,' dated 1849, worthily represents the Tennyson of this very time; breathing a manful self-control, a wise reverence, the spirit of serene power; truly, an inspired

Every piece in the volume possesses, like the whole poem, a unity, a central feeling. Each, while a part in a whole, auxiliary to the others, has a sonnet-like completeness. Each is rounded off into an independent appeal; terminating with an emphatic pause, at once satisfying and stimulative. Now, it is a glimpse of incident, now a perfected Idyl; a thought; a subtile sentiment; always, a true, organic whole. The pervading feeling is palpable throughout. Here, it is the vagueness of a dreamy influence, there, the calm of a deep-toned landscape; the varied burthen.

all to one full intent, of a loving aspiration; the Christmas bells amid the hills, and mist of night; the far-reaching suggestion of infinite mysteries; the full joys, from dawn to eve of a summer's day; a regret, a hope; the large bearing of some idealism; a genial picture of social delights; here April's freshness, autumn's fulness; there, the opposed yet kin scenes viewed by Hesper, the evening, Phosphor, the morning star.

One of the many subordinate values of the 'In Memoriam' is its evidence to the capabilities of the Actual. We may here learn,-if we knew it not before,-how nature contains the material of all most essential, significant poetry. Direct transcript of such is developed by the poet's clear sight and artistic mastery, into the poetic and ideal. The feeling of the poem, the thought, the idyls, the passages of familiar life, all illustrate this. It has ever been Tennyson's characteristic. It is here manifested most fully and directly; a result of the subject matter.

Definiteness is with Tennyson, an unfailing and remarkable part of his power. Every image, thought, picture, is rounded off into the objective. The most spiritual matters are brought within view. There is no verbal mystery, nothing left to guess, remote as are occasional allusions, subtile as are many analogies. All is painted, given in light-sometimes that of a wandering sunbeam, sometimes that of the orange sunset glow. Clear is his sight of that he paints, clear and absolute the thought he records. Hence is he enabled to write it without foreign admixture. As regards words merely, Tennyson is undeniably one of the greatest of Expressers. His is the master's facility. His are the aptest words to things.' In expert' fitting' of the one to the other, his present practice far exceeds even his original gift. Unerring is his speech, as opulent. It is ever adequate to the thought. The balance of the two brings about lucidness, unexampled, in thought so large, feeling so deep, poetry so subtile. It, together with his aesthetic attainments, has secured him his wide audience.

By none of his calibre, is so little imperative need left for return to his pages, after the first few readings. Yet has his speech two messages: one for him who runs, another for him who stays. Some largely imaginative word thereafter reveals itself. The deep meanings grow in fulness. The poetic light of the richly tinted expressions of the ocean mirrors rounded large,' themoanings of the homeless sea,' and the like, is not to be caught at once. The full significance of verses like the following comes with thought :

'And all the phantom nature stands

A hollow form with empty hands ;'

and again :

A

There, where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form; and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.'

passage wherein is harmonized sublimity of thought and of expression.

For instant vividness, on the contrary, take a landscape such

as this :

The last red leaf is whirled away;
The rooks are blown about the sky;
The forest cracked, the waters curled,
The cattle huddled on the lea;

And wildly dashed on tower and tree,

The sunbeam strikes along the world.'

Take touches, to be told by the hundred, of direct reality, like 6 The thousand waves of wheat

That ripple round the lonely grange ;'-
The wintry wood which grides and clangs
Its leafless ribs and iron horns ;'-

The knolls at dawn, where couched at ease

The white kine glimmered, and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field.'

Take this evening piece, the condensed summary of many pic

tures:

'The team is loosened from the wain,
The boat is drawn upon the shore;
Thou listenest to the closing door,
And life is darkened in the brain.'

These are seen, as soon as painted; and their beauty fades not; nor does their delightsomeness sate. But the world of broad yet subtile reality, the imaginative unity, of nature-pieces con tinuous and self-completing, like that at page 98; the profound delicacy, and psychologic truth of sentiment, in the pictures of imaginative sorrow, simply pathetic, and of refined beauty, at pp. 20 and 92; not to speak of the grander bursts of thought; are only apprehended after having dwelt with us, cherished household companions. The aerial grace again, of this picture of the bride, can but grow with familiarity :