Men gave thee nothing; but this happy quest, Its fir-topped Hurst, its farms, its quiet fields, Here was thine height of strength, thy golden prime! What though the music of thy rustic flute Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note Which task'd thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat It fail'd, and thou wast mute! Yet hadst thou alway visions of our light, And long with men of care thou couldst not stay, Left human haunt, and on alone till night. Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here! 'Mid city-noise, not, as with thee of yore, Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home. -Then through the great town's harsh, heart-wearying roar, Let in thy voice a whisper often come, To chase fatigue and fear; Why faintest thou? I wander'd till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON. [ALFRED TENNYSON was born on Aug. 6, 1809, at Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire. He was the third son of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., Rector of Somersby; his mother was a daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche. After education at Louth Grammar School, and at home, he went in 1828 to Trinity College, Cambridge. His 'Poems, chiefly Lyrical,' appeared in 1830. In 1850, having meanwhile won the foremost place among living English poets, he succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate (Nov. 19). In June of the same year he married Miss Emily Sellwood. His first home after marriage was at Twickenham, where his eldest son, Hallam, was born in 1852. In 1853 he removed to Farringford, near Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, where his second son, Lionel, was born in 1854. From the year 1869 onwards he had also a second home, Aldworth, near Haslemere in Surrey, where he usually passed the summer and early autumn. In January, 1884, he was created a peer, by the title of Baron Tennyson, of Aldworth and Farringford. He died at Aldworth on Oct. 6, 1892, aged eighty-three years and two months; and on Oct. 12 was buried in Westminster Abbey.] The gifts by which Tennyson has won, and will keep, his place among the great poets of England are pre-eminently those of an artist. His genius for vivid and musical expression was joined to severe self-restraint, and to a patience which allowed nothing to go forth from him until it had been refined to the utmost perfection that he was capable of giving to it. And his 'law of pure and flawless workmanship' (as Matthew Arnold defines the artistic quality in poetry) embraced far more than language: the same instinct controlled his composition in the larger sense; it is seen in the symmetry of each work as a whole, in the due subordination of detail, in the distribution of light and shade, in the happy and discreet use of ornament. His versatility is not less remarkable: no English poet has left masterpieces in so many different kinds of On another side the spiritual subtlety of the artist is seen in the power of finding words for dim and fugitive traits of con verse. sciousness; as the artist's vision, at once minute and imaginative, is seen in his pictures of nature. By this varied and consummate excellence Tennyson ranks with the great artists of all time. This is the dominant aspect of his poetry. But there is another which presents itself as soon as we take the historical point of view, and inquire into the nature of his influence upon his age. Tennyson was not primarily, like Wordsworth, a philosophical thinker, who felt called upon to be a teacher. But from the middle of the century onwards he was the accepted poet, in respect to thought on religion and on many social questions, of that large public which might be described as the world of cultivated and moderately liberal orthodoxy. Multitudes of these readers were imperfectly capable of appreciating him as an artist: have not some of them been discussing who is 'the Pilot' in Crossing the Bar? But at any rate they heard a voice which they could generally understand; they felt that it was beautiful and noble; and they loved it because it soothed and elevated them. They cherished a poet who placed the centre of religion in a simple reliance on the divine love; who taught that, through all struggles and perplexities, the time was being guided towards some final good; who saw the results of science not as dangers but as reinforcements to faith; who welcomed material progress and industrial vigour, but always sought to maintain the best traditions of English history and character. Now, this popular element in Tennyson's fame-as it may be called relatively to those elements which sprang from a full appreciation of his art-was not due to any conscious self-adaptation on his part to prevailing currents of thought and feeling. It arose from the peculiar relation of his genius to the period in which he grew up to manhood. His early youth was in England a day of bright dreams and confident auguries; for democracy and steam, all things were to be possible. Then came the reaction; doubts and difficulties thickened; questions started up in every field, bringing with them unrest, discouragement, or even despair. At such a season the poet who is pre-eminently an artist has a twofold opportunity; by creating beauty he can comfort the weary; but a yet higher task is to exercise, through his art, an ennobling and harmonizing influence on those more strenuous yet halfdesponding spirits who bear the stress of the transition, while new and crude energies are threatening an abrupt breach with the past. It is a great work to do for a people, to win the popular ear at such a time for counsels of reverence and chivalry; to make them feel that these things are beautiful, and are bonds of the national life, while the forces that tend to disintegration are also tending to make the people sordid and cynical. This is the work that Sophocles, in his later years, did for Athens, and this is what Tennyson did for the England of his prime. His reputation was established with comparative ease. The volume, 'Poems by Two Brothers' (1827), which he and his brother Charles published before they went to Cambridge, showed chiefly a love of poetry, and (in Persia) an exceptional ear for sound: but the Cambridge prize-poem on 'Timbuctoo' (1829) was really notable, both in style and in the command of blank verse; it was a presage, however faint and immature, of the future, and was hailed with a natural delight by the author's friends. In 1830 he brought out 'Poems, chiefly Lyrical'-a thin volume, comprising many poems that have held their place, such as Claribel, Mariana, and The Dying Swan. Writing in the Englishman's Magazine, Arthur Hallam said, 'The features of original genius are clearly and strongly marked. The author imitates nobody.' Tennyson's style was, indeed, from the first wholly distinct from that of any poet who had preceded him. Two years later (1832) he published another volume, entitled simply 'Poems,' and including, among others, Enone, The Palace of Art, The Lotus-Eaters, A Dream of Fair Women, and The Lady of Shalott. There was riper art here than in the former book-larger range of themes, greater depth of feeling, and more human interest; but, though the new work was cordially received by many, the full day of Tennyson's fame was not yet. In that charming poem of his latest years, Merlin and the Gleam-an allegorical retrospect of the poet's own career-a certain moment in one of its earlier stages is indicated by 'the croak of a raven,' a bird which, indeed, seldom fails to cross a new singer's path at one point or another. The world at large was still (to quote Merlin again), 'blind to the magic, and deaf to the melody.' Then it was that Tennyson showed his reserved strength. He was silent for ten years, during which he subjected his old work to unsparing revision, and disciplined himself for work yet better by unwearying self-criticism. In 1842' Poems by Alfred Tennyson' appeared in two volumes. The first volume contained chiefly old poems, revised or re-cast. The pieces in the second volume were almost all new; among them were The Gardener's Daughter, Locksley Hall, Break, break, break, The Two Voices, Ulysses, and Morte d'Arthur. The success was rapid and great. Wordsworth, in a letter to a friend, generously described the author as 'decidedly the first of our living poets.' Tennyson was then only thirty-three. In the popular estimate his reputation was perhaps not much enhanced by The Princess (1847), many as are its beauties, especially lyrical. But when In Memoriam appeared, in 1850, it soon won for him a fame as wide as the Englishspeaking world. In Memoriam is a typical product of his art, but it is even more representative of his attitude towards the problems and mysteries of human life; it is the poem which best reveals the secret of his largest popularity. It might have seemed hopeless to expect general favour for an elegy of such unprecedented length on a youth who had 'miss'd the earthly wreath,' leaving a memory cherished by a few friends, who alone could measure the unfulfilled promise. Never, perhaps, has mastery of poetical resource won a more remarkable triumph than in Tennyson's treatment of this theme. The stanza selected, with its twofold capacity for pathos and for resonance, is exactly suited to a flow of self-communing thought, prevailingly pensive, but passing at moments into a loftier or more jubilant note. The rhythm of this stanza also suits the division of the poem into sections; since the cadence of the fourth line-where the rhyme has less emphasis than in 'the central couplet-can introduce a pause without giving a sense of abruptness. Hence the music of the poem as a whole is continuous, while at the same time each section is an artistic unit. But this felicity is not merely technical; it is closely related to the treatment of the subject-matter. Two strains are interwoven throughout; one is personal-the memory and the sorrow, as they affect the poet; the other is broadly human and general-the experience of the soul as it contemplates life and death, as it finds or misses comfort in the face of nature, as it struggles through doubt to faith, or through anguish to peace. The blending of these two strainswhich are constantly passing into each other-serves to idealise the theme, and so to justify the large scale of the treatment; it has also this effect, that the poem becomes a record of successive spiritual moods, varied as the range of thought and emotion into which the personal grief broadens out. The composition of In Memoriam was, indeed, spread over seventeen years. The form has thus an inner correspondence with the material; each lyric section is a spiritual mood-not sharply separated from that which precedes or fron that which follows it, yet with a completeness of its own. Among particular traits, one which deserves especial notice is the wonderful |