Sun, sun, and sun, thro' finite-infinite space
In finite-infinite Time-our mortal veil
And shattered phantom of that infinite One,
Who made thee unconceivably Thyself

Out of His whole World-self and all in all !'

In this it is true that the poet's earlier faith asserts itself; but it does so in a changed tone, which betokens that the conditions of religious thought are different from what they were thirty years ago. It verges upon mysticism. He no longer

addresses the

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,'

to whom he could say in those days, full of devout conviction— 'Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.'

He can no longer use this language, though he still endeavours to re-convey the meaning of it. And it is this constancy of his faith under saddening and new conditions that seems to us to be the key to his present literary position. The age has changed, but he has remained constant; and instead of being the impassioned exponent of contemporary thought, all he can now do is to bow his head and submit to it.

If this view of him be true, it will follow that we must look on him as, properly speaking, the poet of a completed epoch. This may seem, at first sight, a startling judgment of a man whose genius we believe to be still in its full vigour. But our meaning is less startling than it may seem to be. Though ages pass, their effects do not perish, nor is their inspiration obsolete because its sources are now sealed to us. The case is exactly the reverse of this. Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, in one of his most pregnant apophthegms,

'Deeds in hours of insight willed

May be through hours of gloom fulfilled; '

and what he says of hours may be also said of epochs. The lessons which sight has taught us may be practised, and may increase in use, when sight is for the time withdrawn. The mind of the world, and the mind of England especially, during the particular period we have been speaking of, was undergoing a momentous experience, the wisdom taught by which will long overlive its circumstances. It is that wisdom, or at least the noblest part of it, that Mr. Tennyson has assimilated, and which he has kept alive for all men in his consummate verse. In the present generation his power has not ceased; it has only

changed its function. Whereas his greatest work, as we have said, was moulded by a past epoch, it may help to mould a coming one, and to revive the beliefs and feelings it was itself inspired by. There are some elements in it, no doubt, that are perishable, but the larger part of it is for all time; and Mr. Tennyson has said much, that when he said it was new to poetry, which once so said will never become old.

We have one more observation to add, which will help perhaps to illustrate our main thesis. We have tried to point out that Mr. Tennyson's special function has been to interpret a special period, and that that period has now gone by. The correctness of these views with regard to his literary office will be realised more clearly if we consider who succeeded him in it. His successor, it seems to us, was none other than George Eliot. What Mr. Tennyson's poetry was to the second quarter of our century, George Eliot's novels have been to the third. The aim of both writers has been the same, though their methods have been so very different. They have both chosen as their one constant theme human nature as related to modern thought; and they have tried to reconcile what was highest in the one to what was most deeply true in the other. But the intellectual condition of the world, as the novelist saw it, was not the condition that inspired and nerved the poet. The novelist was living into her true period, just as the poet was living out of his; and the very influences that have cast a gloom upon the latter have been those that have given her solemn chiaro-oscuro to the former. Mr. Tennyson has ever tried to discern God through the material universe. It is George Eliot's endeavour to show us we can do without Him. Both treat the affections as the chief treasures of life; but Mr. Tennyson makes these the germ of faith, George Eliot makes them the end of it. Mr. Tennyson looks forward to 'Some far-off divine event

To which the whole creation moves.'

Such a vision as this is to George Eliot a fond delusion. For her in the farthest future there is nothing but one blank catastrophe, when

'Human time

Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
Unread for ever.'

That all men in the present day, or even many men, share this dark forecast, we do not presume to say. But though it is not the view that masters the present age, it is without doubt the view that distinguishes it. It occupies even those whom it

does not conquer, and, either by defiance or submission, we have each and all to deal with it. It has been Mr. Tennyson's mission to express faith; it has been George Eliot's to combat with despair. Mr. Tennyson's spirit breathes still in his latest lines. It is true that, as we have said, it has now a wistful sadness in it; but for that very reason it will here help us better to a comparison. The following is from his last volume; it is from the poem of De Profundis,' a part of which we have already quoted. He is addressing the human soul at the close of its action here. Still,' he says

6

'still depart

From death to death, thro' life to life, and find
Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought

Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite,

But this main miracle, that thou art thou,

With power on thine own act and on the world.'

Let us now turn to George Eliot, and hear her on the same subject. In her novel of Middlemarch' she represents a noble nature, starting in life full of lofty ambitions; and the story is the record of their failures. And what is the conclusion that this suggests to the authoress? There is some comfort in it, but it is comfort of infinite sadness. It is nothing more than this:-That vain as life may be, let us not lose heart utterly, for it is not wholly vain. That things,' she says, 'are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.' Thus speaks the spirit of the epoch that has succeeded Mr. Tennyson's. To some of the popular writers of the present day their best consolation is the thought that things are not so ill with us as they might have been;' their one shield against despair is an icy stoicism, and their one bond of brotherhood is less of hope than of suffering. If it be the mission then of the great poet or artist to express and not to struggle with the spirit of his epoch, it will be hardly matter of wonder if the course of events lately has not been such as to stimulate Mr. Tennyson. That his latter works have had less influence than his former ones, we shall see to be inevitable from the very circumstances of their composition; and the fact is not to be attributed to any failure of the poet's genius. On the contrary, we believe that were Mr. Tennyson, in his present maturity, to be moved back to the years with whose spirit he was most in harmony, he would excel his former self wherever that was possible; and that what he would do would be as great an advance upon what he has done, as Rizpah' is upon The May Queen' or The Grandmother.'

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ART. VIII.—1. Lectures on the Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision. By Professor HELMHOLTZ. Translated by PYE SMITH, M.D., F.R,C.P. ('Popular Lectures on Scientific

Subjects.') London: 1873.

2. Eyesight, Good and Bad. A Treatise on the Exercise and Preservation of Vision. By ROBERT BRUDENELL CARTER, F.R.C.S. London: 1880.

IN

N his 'Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects,' first presented to English readers about seven years ago, Professor Helmholtz dwelt with some measure of satisfaction upon the circumstance that ophthalmic science had made an advance within a brief period of years which was quite without a parallel in any other department of the healing art. This statement was well borne out by the account which he himself gave in those lectures of the Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,' and it is perhaps even more strikingly confirmed in the little volume which has been since printed by Mr. Brudenell Carter. Both books aim at wide usefulness, and are cast in a popular form, and both are notable and excellent in their way. But each has a purpose and method of its own. In a brief introduction which is prefixed to the lectures of Helmholtz, Professor Tyndall draws attention to the circumstance that those discourses by the Berlin Professor of Physics were primarily addressed to an audience of refined and cultivated literary taste, and that they were in reality delivered with a view of awakening an interest in the researches of science in that favoured section of the social community. It must be admitted that their distinguished author has been singularly fortunate in the accomplishment of this design, for the lectures are models of the way in which such subjects should be presented to educated, but unscientific, people. In Mr. Brudenell Carter's more recent book the important theme which has been so gracefully and eloquently advocated by Professor Helmholtz is followed up into its practical and serviceable applications. The properties of light, and the structure and functions of the eye, are in the first instance explained; and this is done in language so simple and clear that the subject is brought within the easy apprehension of persons of the most ordinary intelligence, with one perhaps not very serious, although noteworthy, drawback, the somewhat too free use of unfamiliar words, which are out of place in a treatise addressed to the audience which Mr. Carter contemplates. It is hardly to be conceived that such terms as emmetropia, hypermetropia,

asthenopia, and presbyopia can be of such frequent occurrence in the precepts and injunctions which are repeated' in the author's consulting-room day by day,' as they are in the pages of the book which is here consecrated to the task of explaining those maxims, and of making them more readily and easily understood. With this one reservation the very high praise may be awarded to Mr. Carter's little book, that it is a worthy companion and sequence to the popular lectures of the German panegyrist of ophthalmic science. Mr. Carter's volume, although of small compass and unpretentious aspect, is really a most serviceable exposition of the principles which are concerned in the exercise and preservation of the human organs of sight, and of the functions of sound vision, as will be abundantly gleaned from some of the following notices of its

contents.

All readers of the Edinburgh Review' will be aware that the eye of the most highly organised animals, and of man, is a camera obscura, or dark chamber, analogous in many respects to the instrument with which the photographer accomplishes his very beautiful process of painting a picture by the limning power of light. The analogy between the structure of this instrument and the optical provisions of the eye has been alluded to by authors on popular science again and again, and Professor Helmholtz very skilfully avails himself of this analogy in laying the foundations of his account of the recent discoveries relating to the organ of vision. It is not, however, so generally understood how it is that either the instrument of the photographer, or the eye, remains a dark chamber, notwithstanding the fact that it has a clear and as it were open window exposed to the free impact of light. This, indeed, is not alluded to even by Helmholtz in his introductory explanation, and may therefore prove worthy of a passing remark. The circumstance is in a large measure dependent upon the somewhat curious fact that a shadow is cast behind even a transparent lens of glass when it is exposed to the full sunshine. The glass casts a deep shadow everywhere, excepting in the central spot into which the sunbeams are thrown very much as a circular disc of opaque cardboard in the same situation might do. This is a necessary consequence of the action of the lens, since the bright focal image which it constitutes is formed by the drawing together into that spot of all the rays of light which strike upon the curved front of the glass. As all the rays are concentred in that spot, there remain none that are available for the simultaneous illumination of the surface around. If the combination of lenses of the