successors, not only undefiled but enriched, as the noble vehicle of human thought. For the poetry of the future, he has created models of form, lofty standards of art triumphant, because it is art in obedience to laws. He has enriched English literature by jewels of expression, whose beauty is enhanced by the dexterous workmanship of their exquisite setting; by lyrical gems which sparkle, if not with the morning freshness of dewdrops, at least with the brilliance of the finest diamonds; by literary mosaics of diction, matchless in form, colour, and harmony, into which are dovetailed separate particles of consummate beauty; by clear-cut classic figures, chiselled in firm outline on the cold and lasting marble; by realistic pictures of English landscapes, painted with the homely richness of Gainsborough and bathed in the golden warmth of Claude; by a noble rosary of sorrow, whose beads, strung on the golden thread of hope, are enriched with every detail of consolation, and engraved with every symbol of comfort, which varied reading, fertile fancy, or musing meditation could devise.

Never cosmopolitan in his sympathies, but always essentially English, his national feeling gathered purity and depth from the narrowness of its concentrated intensity. He has stirred the blood of the people by wedding to virile verse heroic deeds of prowess. He has revived, stimulated, and kept alive, the old-world, half-forgotten sentiment of patriotism. He has seen, and taught others to see, new beauties in Nature with the precision of the man of science and the interpretative insight of the poet. With one hand, he has faithfully mirrored the beliefs and disbeliefs, the despair and wistful faith, the repose and the unrest, of his century; with the other, he has kindled, and satisfied, a larger hope in human destiny, and, seeking the white light of truth through the prismatic colours of the creeds, has bumanized, enlarged, and strengthened the religious faiths of thousands. Alike for the nation, and for individuals, he has upheld a lofty standard of life. Accepting the spirit of progress, but not despising the wisdom of the past, he has maintained the balance, for himself and others, between new and old, and rendered it impossible for many to be either obstructive or destructive. More than any other poet, or even writer, of the century, he has striven to reconcile industrial activities and material interests with the old traditions of faith and reverence, to burn and blast with lightning fire the vices of modern civilization, to uphold the high-souled energies, refinements, and disinterestedness that commercial communities are most prone to neglect, if not to despise.

When Lord Tennyson was already seized with his last fatal

illness,

illness, the 'Death of Enone' was announced for publication. By a strange coincidence it was given to the public on the anniversary of Browning's death. It might be possible to treat this posthumous volume as the epitome of the main body of work to which it forms the epilogue. Many of the most familiar varieties of Tennysonian thought and metre occur in the Poems, which are gathered under the title of 'The Death of Enone,' and which, like Browning's Asolando,' contains many fine things, not unworthy of their author. Time has neither chilled the old sympathy with the sights and sounds of Nature, nor shaken the old hope that all things make for good. The man and his purpose are still there. There is the same wistful, yet persistent, faith in God, in Duty, and Immortal Love, the same melodious smoothness of verse, the same measured simplicity of language, the same silver-grey, placid perfection of verbal art, the same eclectic catholicity of interest which draws its inspiration from Hellenic mythology, Christian hagiology, or the faiths of Islam.

It is, however, one thing to receive with grateful respect the wreath which has, as it were, fallen from the Laureate's bier ; it is another thing to say that his reputation will be enhanced by anything that it contains, or to deny that it includes work which falls below the exacting standard that Tennyson taught us to create. Two or three of the pieces are old, the remainder are new, and the recent work bears the impress of years. The passion for correctness burns with unabated fire; the adequacy of treatment, as well as the power of pleasing, still survive in something like their former vigour: there is loss of strength rather than of cunning; and it is marvellous that in 'Silent Voices' the octogenarian poet should have attained so near to his highest level.

Now once more, as three years ago, the poet sings his sweetest under the shadow of approaching Death. But, except for this second swan-song, the richness of colour and fulness of tone are partly fled; the note is thinner, the glow shines with fainter gleam. Sweet and varied as the music still is, it falls like an echo from the past, suggesting something similar, but better, that has gone before. Throughout there is that recurrence to youthful scenes or efforts, which is often the prelude of departure; the silent voices of Lincolnshire playmates recall him to the lowlands; the gleam of a sunlight that has faded flickers before his eyes; the dialect of Spilsby, so familiar to his boyhood, rings in his ear; the wail of Enone, wafted to him from antiquity as, in his youth, he mused among the vales of Ida, sounds once again, but more feebly than before.

One

One solemn strain pervades almost the whole, now subdued, now pronounced, yet always audible. The high priest of English song speaks from the altar of those aspects of life that appear the most important to one who nears the dark portal at the limit of his human state, and who, with awe indeed, but without dread of the hidden purpose, trusts himself to the keeping of that Power which alone is great.'

The first of the three longer poems- The Death of Enone' —is taken from the tenth book of the tedious epic of Quintus Smyrnæus. It is one of those classic themes, in which Tennyson's art reached its highest perfection, because the austere self-restraint of the Hellenic model nerved him to a more chastened reserve, and subdued the enamelled richness of his vivid fancy. And the poem itself, in its clear-cut precision, its harmony of sober colouring, its power of condensed expression, is a noble product of the natural instinct for form which the study of the classics fostered in Tennyson. Bare of ornament, strong, succinct, stern, 'The Death of Enone' is more effective than the romantic elaborated passion of Mr. William Morris's fine poem on the same subject. Less pictorial, and more statuesque than the earlier Enone,' it is without a touch of that emphasis of pathos, which, in its essential modernness, is so opposed to the spirit of antiquity. The lines are already too familiar to be quoted. But the late Laureate is at his best in the tragic prayer of Paris and its rejection by Enone, and even he has written few finer passages of its kind than the scene of love and death, with which the poem closes.

St. Telemachus,' the second of the longer poems, is told with all Tennyson's skill in pictorial narrative. But the coldness of the classic model seems to us inappropriate to this story of Christian hagiology. No thrill of feeling interrupts the narrative, and no quiver of human emotion ruffles the equable flow of measured language. Yet St. Telemachus' contains one splendid passage of blank verse, which deserves a place beside Tennyson's finest efforts. It is that in which the solitary watcher conceives the half-conscious idea of visiting Rome.

In 'Akbar's Dream' the poet makes an interesting confession of his own religious position. It is his own detestation of religious controversy, and his own eclectic faith spurning the formalisms of the creeds, that Tennyson expresses. Stately, measured, melodious in language, it concludes with a finely grandiloquent hymn to the sun. But, apart from its autobiographical value, the poem seems to us indistinct and disconnected. It rather contains the whisperings of an ancient

sage,

sage, who murmurs his thoughts to himself, than the colloquy of a ruler with his trusted counsellor. Tennyson at his best would not have employed prose notes in order to explain his poem, and his adoption of such a device is so far a confession of failure. Nor does 'Akbar's Dream' display the mastery of material and the skill in grouping, which made Browning's monologues so dramatic.

Of the minor poems there is little to say. 'The Bandit's Wife' gains little from being narrated in verse. If told at all in such a form, it would have been more vigorously handled by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. 'Charity,' again, is a story which, like its predecessor, would have been equally effective in prose. The Curate and the Churchwarden' is not unworthy of the man who wrote 'The Northern Farmer,' though it is not equal to that masterpiece. Tennyson has shown much of his dramatic insight in the delineation of the self-centred worldliness of the shrewd old churchwarden, who is convinced that the church and the parson exist for, and through, him, and hates his old persuasion with the aversion of a pervert aggravated by a sense of personal injury. The poisoning of the pond, however, is an ancient jest, which Julian Young places in the mouth of a farmer's wife. The volume concludes with a series of poems on those solemn themes, which the poet always handled with consummate success, and among them are not only 'The Silent Voices,' but a fine sonnet on 'Doubt and Prayer.'

The most recent collection of the Laureate's verse supplies, in many respects, an epitome of his work. But it does not contain any of the finest examples of his poetry, and no just estimate of his multifarious poetic activity can be formed upon so limited a field. A wider survey is needed. Yet, if once the whole mass of his poetry is investigated, the variety of points creates a real difficulty. His art, his melody, his language, his poetry of nature; his pictorial, descriptive, and analytic faculties; his epic or dramatic powers, his lesson as a moral or religious teacherthese, and countless other subjects, suggest themselves, each of which might be specialised with advantage. But, looking at his work as a whole, two points seem to stand out conspicuously-the continuous advance which culminates in 1842, and the publication of his best poetry between the years 1842 and 1860. Within these eighteen years Tennyson's genius produced its most perfect fruits. It may be admitted that some of his finest poems belong to a later date than the publication of 'Tithonus,' that all his dramas were written at a subsequent period, and that his St. Martin's Summer' was extraordinarily rich in its yield of flowers, that are not pale and scentless like

the

the products of winter's sunless skies, but are fresh, fragrant, deep-coloured. Yet, making all these deductions, the general truth remains; and the two objects of the following pages will be, first, to trace Tennyson's continuous advance up to 1842, and secondly, to consider the characteristics of the poetic genius displayed in the poetry of 1842-60.

Alfred Tennyson was born on August 6th, 1809. The first eighteen years of his life were uneventful, passed in a remote country village, and unbroken by any such contact with the larger world as is afforded by a public school education. The time when the mind is most susceptible, and when impressions take their firmest root, was spent at home in the companionship of brothers and sisters, and in daily familiarity with rural scenery of a peculiar kind. Every surrounding fostered, and nothing checked, the expansion of those pure and simple domestic affections, which gave to Tennyson so much of his tenderness and strength. And the character of the country, with which he was in hourly communion, promoted those habits of microscopic observation, that afterwards yielded so rich a harvest of the quiet eye. No grandeur of scenery sated the appetite; but in the level wastes and marshy flats of Lincolushire the patient watcher found abundant beauty.

The musing, meditative life of a sensitive, imaginative boy, who felt that, when Byron died, the world was at an end, soon blossomed into verse. At the age of eighteen he published a stout little volume of 228 pages, containing 102 pieces of poetry by himself and his brother Charles. Poems by Two Brothers," introduced by a line from Martial, Hæc nos novimus esse nihil,' was published in 1826. The width of reading, implied by the choice of mottoes, or suggested by the foot-notes, is considerable. Classical and modern authors-Virgil, Terence, and Horace, Claudian, Ovid, Lucretius, and Sallust, appear side by side with Racine and Rousseau, Gray, Hume, Ossian, Moore, Scott, Young, Milton, Byron, and the Mysteries of Udolpho.' Byron's influence is especially strong; the boys affect the Byronic melancholy, imitate the Hebrew Melodies, and write a poem on his death. In metrical experiments they are more catholic; a great variety of metres is attempted, and some degree of ease and freedom is attained.

The boyish volume of 1826 is now chiefly valuable for the indications it affords of the poet's reading, and of the influences under which his taste was formed. Except in the imitative skill and metrical facility, the poems afford little promise of Tennyson's future. They belong to the student period of his art. The melodious blank verse of Timbuctoo,' with which

Alfred