Disappointed in love, and sickened in hope of civilized life, the speaker dreams, for a moment, of flying to some savage land, and leading the exciting life of a tropical hunter. In the reaction of his thoughts how vividly is expressed the precious preeminence of European existence, with all its attendant evils!

"Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,
But I count the grey barbarian lower than the Christian child.

I to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!
Mated with a squalid savage-what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time-

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand and gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon.
Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

Mother-Age! (for mine I knew not,) help me as when life begun;
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun-

OI see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set;
Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet."

Who shall say, after this, that Alfred Tennyson wants power? There speaks the man of this moving age. There speaks the spirit baptized into the great spirit of progress. In the silence of his meditative retreat the poet sees the world rolling before him, and is struck with the majesty of its mind subduing its physical mass to. its uses, and trampling on time, space, and the far greater evilsprejudice, false patriotism, and falser ideas of glory. Brotherhood, peace, and comfort advance out of the school and the shop, and happiness sits securely beneath the guardianship of

"The Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."

Alfred Tennyson has given many a fatal blow to many an old and narrow maxim in his poems; he has breathed into his later ones the generous and the victorious breath of noblest philanthropy, the offspring of the great renovator-the Christian religion. This will give him access to the bosoms of the multitude

"Men his brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new;" and his vigorous song will cheer them at their toil, and nerve them to more glorious efforts. Of the hold which his poetry has already taken on the public heart, a striking instance was given some time ago. The anonymous author of The New Timon stepped out of his way and his subject to represent Tennyson's muse as a puling school-miss The universal outburst of indignation from the press scared the opprobrious lines speedily out of the snarler's pages. A new edition was quickly announced, from which they had wisely vanished.

Perhaps, however, the crown of all Tennyson's verse is The Two Voices. I have said that he is not metaphysical. He is better. Leaving to others to build and rebuild theories of the human mind, Tennyson deals with its palpable movements like a genuine philo

sopher, and one of the highest order, a Christian philosopher The Two Voices are the voice of an animated assurance in the heart, and the voice of scepticism. In this poem there is no person who has passed through the searching, withering ordeal of religious doubts and fears as to the spiritual permanency of our existence-and who has not?—but will find in these simple stanzas the map and history of their own experience. The clearness, the graphic power, and logical force and acumen which distinguish this poem are of the highest order. There is nothing in the poems of Wordsworth which can surpass, if it can equal it. Let us take, as our last quotation, the closing portion of this lyric, the whole of which cannot be read with too much attention. Here the combat with Apollyon in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is most simply and beautifully put an end to by the buoyant spirit of nature, and man walking amid his human ties hand in hand with her and piety.

* Suicide.

So much for the poetry; but still where is the poet? It may bo supposed, by what has already been said, that he is not very readily to be found. Next to nothing has yet been known of him or his haunts. It has been said that his poetry showed from internal evidence that he came somewhere out of the fens. In three-fourths of his verses there is something about "glooming flats," "the clustered marish-mosses 99 -a poplar, a water-loving tree, that

"A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand;
Left on the shore."

These images show a familiarity with fen-lands, and flat sea-coast, to a certainty; but Alfred Tennyson, after all, though a Lincolnshire man, is not a native of the fens. He was born near enough to know them well, but not in them. His native place is Somersby, a little village lying about midway between the market towns of Spilsby and Horncastle, and containing less than a hundred inhabitants. His father, George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., was rector of that and the adjoining parish of Enderby. He was a man of very various talents— something of a poet, a painter, an architect, and a musician. He was also a considerable linguist and mathematician. Dr. Tennyson was the elder brother of Mr. Tennyson D'Eyncourt. Alfred Tennyson, one of several children, was born at the parsonage at Somersby, of which a view stands at the head of this chapter. From the age of seven till about nine or ten, he went to the grammar-school of Louth, in the same county, and after that returned home, and was educated by his father, till he went to Trinity College, Cambridge.

The native village of Tennyson is not situated in the fens, but in a pretty pastoral district of softly sloping hills and large ash-trees. It is not based on bogs, but on a clean sandstone. There is a little glen in the neighbourhood, called by the old monkish name of Holywell. Over the gateway leading to it, some bygone squire has put up an inscription, a medley of Virgil and Horace

and within, a stream of clear water gushes out of a sand-rock, and over it stands an old school-house, almost lost among the trees, and of late years used as a wood-house, its former distinction only signified by a scripture text on the walls-" Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth." There are also two brooks in this valley, which flow into one at the bottom of the glebe-field, and by these the young poet used to wander and meditate. To this scenery we find him turning back in his Ode to Memory :

"Come from the woods that belt the grey hill side,

The seven elms, the poplars four

That stand beside my father's door,

And chiefly from the brook that loves

To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand,

Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn,
In every elbow and turn,

The filtered tribute of the rough woodlands.
O! hither lead thy feet!

Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds
Upon the ridged wolds,

When the first matin-song hath wakened loud
Over the dark dewy earth forlorn,

What time the amber morn

Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud."

In the churchyard stands a Norman cross, almost single of its kind in England.

Alfred Tennyson spent some years in London, and he may be traced to Hastings, Eastbourne, Cheltenham, and the like places. He resided some time at Montpelier-row, Twickenham, and he now resides at Farringford, in the Isle of Wight. Still, it is very possible you may come across him in a country inn, with a foot on each hob of the fireplace, a volume of Greek in one hand, his meerschaum in the other, so far advanced towards the seventh heaven, that he would not thank you to call him back into this nether world. Wherever he is, however, in some still nook of enormous London, or the stiller one of some far-off sea-side hamlet, he is pondering a lay for eternity

"Losing his fire and active might

In a silent meditation,

Falling into a still delight

And luxury of contemplation."

Having had an uncle in Parliament, Tennyson has received more government patronage than any other poet that we can call to mind at the same early age. He has enjoyed for several years a pension of 2001. per annum. On the death of Wordsworth, he was appointed Poet Laureate. He has also, since the last edition of this work, married, and has added largely to his fame by his poems, The Princess, and In Memoriam. We cannot say the same of his late production, Maud. That, thrown forth in the moment of war fever, is a production which we could willingly see blotted out of the list of his works, and forgotten. We look in vain in it either for Tennyson's usually exquisite melody of rhythm, or the soundness of his philosophy. It advances the monstrous dogma, that peace is the

fount of all the crimes of society. If that be true, Christianity cannot be so; for its Author is styled the Prince of Peace, and the prophesied consummation of His kingdom is, "Peace on earth, and goodwill to man." But if Tennyson's doctrine be true, the more we advance in peace, the more we shall advance in social crime. If, as he asserts, war be absolutely necessary to civilization, then are all the arts of peace, and the efforts of education, vain. To maintain civilization, men must continue to murder, not incidentally, but in the wholesale line. When the nations are prepared to "beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks," we must take care of ourselves; for we shall be overrun with burglars, cut-throats, and domestic poisoners. That Millennium to which Christianity points us, instead of a time to be desired, is one of all others to be dreaded; for peace being perfect and universal, on the Tennysonian theory, crime must be paramount and intolerable. The philosophy of Locksley Hall was something better than this. There the poet looked forward

"Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled,
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law."

The staggering dissonance of the versification of Maud is not less remarkable than the grating dissonance of the sentiment. But we look onward to the great epic of Arthur, and trust in that to see the poet reappear in robust health and full glory, in a harmony of numbers, and of spirit equal to the national utility of the theme. We can allow Tennyson a speck or two in his disc, as we do