He was something like the same experience of | than more massive structures. the nothingness of all material things not great in drama, though his insight which Wordsworth claimed for him- into ruling passions and purposes, espeself in the great “Ode on the Intima- cially when dealing with the simpler tions of Immortality." And the picture and rougher and more massive charof the impending moral catastrophe acter of half-developed natures, was in "The Last Tournament" is still profound, as is shown by his sketch of grander. There we see the moral ana- | the "Grandmother," of the two" Northlogue of "ragged rims of thunder brood- ern Farmers," and of the "Northern ing low, and shadow streaks of rain." Cobbler," who conquers his passion for Whatever may be the shortcomings in drink by boldly confronting the tempter the picture of Arthur, "The Idylls of day after day in the shape of a great the King" seem to us to contain a most bottle of gin. But these were the incipowerful delineation of the various con- dental triumphs of a great poet. For flicts between earthly passions and spir- the most part, his concrete characters itual aims. If the literary perfection are not powerful. His figures have no be less complete than that of "In Me- wealth of life in them, and their actions moriam," the design was richer, and do not carry you on. But though on covered a much wider field. ground of this kind he could not touch the hem of Shakespeare's garment, the little songs with which the dramas and the longer poems are interspersed are, for beauty, tenderness, and sweetness, quite Shakespearian. And they have, moreover, very frequently a singularly dramatic effect, - Fair Rosamond's little song, for instance, in “Becket: " Rainbow, stay, And Tennyson's ideal of spiritual life included not only the individual, but the nation. No one can read these visions of the Arthurian kingdom without being conscious that the poet's eye was fixed on the spiritual ambitions and the spiritual shrinkings and timidities of his own country and his own day. Indeed, he expressly says so in his epilogue addressed to the queen. His sympathy with deeds of valor makes the English heart beat higher. His dread of anything like national insincerity or unmanly self-distrust raised the courage and daring of his fellow-countrymen to their proper level. And he ended his Idylls with one of the finest exhortations to his own people which our language contains : The loyal to their Crown throne In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle knows And dreads it, we are fall'n. Never was Tennyson greater than when he spoke for the nation with something like the authority of one conscious of the nation's reverence and trust. But perhaps the highest point which Tennyson's poetry ever reached was in those exquisite little lyrics which test the inspiration of a poet more even It is the same with the lovely song, "Come into the Garden, Maud,” — perhaps the most perfect of its kind in English literature, and Enid's song, "Turn, fortune, turn thy wheel," and with Maid Marian's song, "Love flew in at the window," in his "Foresters." There is singular beauty and even dramatic effect in that song, as there is in all Tennyson's songs, only they are all the songs of a musing and meditative] fancy, not of a wild and free imagination. Milton spoke of Shakespeare as "Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child," warbling "his native wood-notes wild.' That description would never have applied to Tennyson. His wood-notes are not wild. They are, perhaps, even more beautiful, but they are also less simple. They are to Shakespeare's songs, what the garden rose is to the | tual activity, profound order, and a wild rose, richer, fuller, more won- consequent advance in all forms of derful works of art, but with less of prosperity conspire together to free a that exquisite singleness of effect which nation from pressing care. Virgil is conquers by its very modesty. Tenny- only possible in an Augustan period, son's songs are miracles of gaiety or and the resemblance between Virgil pathos, or wonder or grief; especially and Lord Tennyson has impressed of grief. Our language has never else- every observer, as it also is believed to where reached the special beauty of his have impressed himself. It is not only "Tears, idle tears," or his "Break, that his poetry, powerful as it often break, break; nor for magic of sound was, is emphatically that of a peaceful has the spell of his "Blow, bugles, time, when the features of the landblow" ever been commanded by an- scape, the problems in the minds of other. But even these perfect blossoms men, the loveliness rather than the of song are all the growth of highly storminess of all things most strike the complex conditions of thought or feel-poet, but that the poet who sang of ing, which show themselves in the these things, who celebrated the virelaborate delicacy and harmony of their tues, and discussed the destiny, and structure. High culture is of the very essence of Tennyson's poetry, be it picture, or playful reverie, or love, or sorrow, or self-reproach. He is, indeed, the living refutation of Carlyle's theory that genius is never self-conscious. Without clear self-consciousness, there could never have been a Tennyson, and therefore, without clear self-consciousness, one of the highest types of genius would be impossible. From The Economist. grew enthusiastic over the progress of mankind, received from his countrymen and from the world at large such a meed of appreciation. Tennyson could hardly have existed in the midst of calamity or of civil strife, or of any stirring of the foundations of things, and most assuredly in such periods his verses, which, grandly beautiful as they often are, are always polished until something of strength as well as of roughness has disappeared from them, could never have received a welcome so heartfelt and so deep. Tennyson was the poet of his age, as is so often said, and future commentators studying WE cannot admit that a scene like his work are sure to decide that the age that presented by Westminster Abbey was one of settled order, of placid if on Wednesday is in any way outside the penetrating thought, of deeds which, purview of a journal like the Economist. even when most daring, were controlled On the contrary, we should contend by some impulse other than unrethat the possibility of its occurrence was strained will. Even in aspiration his directly dependent on conditions to poetry is never lawless, and if it has a which the material progress of the fault it is that it assumes too persiskingdom is largely due. The almost tently the regularity of everything inuniversal interest taken in the funeral cluding human actions and desires. A of Lord Tennyson, the presence of that beauty as of summer in the afternoon, crowd of representative men, including an eloquence strong in its tranquillity the second member of the Cabinet and as well as its force, a melody for which the chief of the Opposition, the Amer-"mellow" is felt to be the appropriate ican chargé d'affaires, the leaders in adjective, mark all Tennyson's most science, literature, and art, together characteristic work, even when it is not with the sorrow manifested by the edu- tinged with a melancholy, born not of cated classes, and the declarations of a wearying strain, but of protracted sympathy received from the entire musing, such as is possible only in the world, all point to one of those epochs quiet. These are the notes of Tennyof high civilization in which intellec-son's special genius, whose develop ment at least was due to a long peace, | to be prophetical, but covers a meaning to a progress so continuous that it sug- not to be apprehended. This rider gested a law, to a condition all around him which was nowhere unendurable. His verse suggests heroism very often, but never despairing resistance, and even when he is saddest there is always something in his strains which tells of an inner feeling that the world and the God who made it are both good. There is no tornado coming in the atmosphere which surrounded Tennyson's thought. It is conceivable, of course, that such a poet should exist at any time, for the poet's impulse is from within, but that his poetry should receive enthusiastic admiration, should awaken a kind of national affection for the man who poured it forth, is conceivable only when, as regarded external storms, the world was very still. One could hardly imagine " In Memoriam " or the "Idylls of the King" being so much as written, far less greeted with shouts of congratulation, except at a time when readers, fairly contented with circumstances around, could pause to think and dream. Tennyson could sing of nature as few men ever sang, but it is of nature as those see it who dwell in scenes where disturbance except from one's own thoughts hardly even rises in the imagination. It is in such times as produced him that nations grow rich in culture, in the arts, and in the prac-appeared in the sustained dignity of his tice of material accumulation. There is another quality in Lord Tennyson's work which should have, and we doubt not has, a charm for the kind of audience to which the Economist usually addresses itself. He is one of the sanest poets who ever lived, was, indeed, hardly rivalled in this attribute by any great verse-maker except Virgil and Shakespeare. Perversity is not in him, or extravagance, or that exaggeration which suggests that the mind in its movement had attained a pace beyond its owner's control. Full of fire as it is, there is not a poem in all his mass of work in which there is a trace of delirium or a verse which its author could not explain or justify, or a line which the reader has to accept like some sentence of a prophet which must be taken never loses hold of the bridle of Pegasus, never falls in his eagerness into a chasm, never breaks utterly away from any known course. It is not that his steed is tame. The speed and rush of Tennyson's poetry, as in such common examples as the "Death of the Duke of Wellington," or "Locksley Hall," or the "Charge of the Light Brigade," is something matchless, but it is the rush and speed of the trained charger, not of the wild horse of the Steppes. Tennyson had thought out all he meant to say, and said precisely that and no more, and if "all the charm of all the Muses often flowered in a lonely word," that word had been selected as carefully as if the poet had been a diplomatist conducting a serious quarrel for his State. It is Mendelssohn's music, not Wagner's, that he offers, and he is in his most wilful moods incapable of breaking into discord. Even when his inspiration is at its highest there is sense in his verse always, and clear thought, as of a man whose mind, however stirred, never grew turbid or overburdened. This high self-restraint in a man of such powers is exceedingly rare in literature, and springs doubtless from that quality of wisdom which his friends say was always in Lord Tennyson's talk, which long life, and which detractors and publishers say was never wanting in his management of pecuniary affairs. Like Shakespeare, he saw no reason why, because he was poet, he should be a fool in the ordinary affairs of life, and like him he made a fortune. He never in fact pleaded his genius to excuse an aberration, but lived always as a good member of the community, whose duty to those around him was not confined to the exercise of his splendid gift. Southey did the same thing, but Southey had no more Tennyson's dignity than his powers. The latter was as independent, sometimes almost as savage as Byron, but unlike Byron, he regarded his powers not as properties but as trusts, and never misused them even when most conscious—and he was not an unconscious man at all— that they sep- | drawings ere it is reduced to the size arated him from the majority of his desired. Much friction is generated in kind. Much of his work will perish the process, notwithstanding the use with the national mood which it embodied, but we do not doubt that much will live, and that he will be regarded, even centuries hence, as a figure whose rare powers and strong sense and lofty dignity of character fully became that great Victorian era throughout which, until its close approached, he had been the recognized great poet of his time. From Chambers' Journal. WIRE AND WIRE PRODUCTS. POSSIBLY but few persons realize the enormous strides made of late years by the wire industry, or the constantly increasing consumption of an article which, in one form or another, enters into almost every art and industry, and ministers directly and indirectly in no small degree to the comfort and wellbeing of every civilized community. Wire is no new thing; specimens of metallic shreds dating as far back as 1700 B.C. are stated to have been discovered; while a sample of wire made by the Ninevites some eight hundred years B.C. is exhibited at the Kensington Museum in London. Both Homer and Pliny allude to wire. The art of wire-drawing was not practised until the fourteenth century, or introduced into this country until the seventeenth century, all wire made previously having been formed by hammering into rounded lengths narrow strips of metal cut from plates previously beaten out. The manufacture of wire as now carried out may be briefly and concisely stated, and consists in attenuating or reducing in section thin rods of the metal under manipulation by drawing them cold through holes in a draw-plate, usually made of hard steel. The wiredrawer's bench is furnished with a horizontal cylinder, driven by steam or other power, on which the wire is wound after leaving the draw-plate. The holes in the draw-plate are arranged in decreasing diameters; and a fine wire may require some twenty or thirty of lubricants; and "annealing" is necessary to counteract the brittleness produced in the wire. Where great accuracy is requisite, the wire is drawn through rubies or other hard stones in the draw-plate. The speed of the drawing cylinder is increased as the diameter of the wire diminishes. Much confusion has existed in regard to the gauges of wires, no fewer than fifty-five different gauges being mentioned by a recent writer, of which forty-five were for measuring and determining the sizes of wire as made and sold within the United Kingdom. The Whitworth gauge, introduced in 1857 by Sir Joseph Whitworth, and the Birmingham wire-gauge (B. W. G.) have been extensively employed. In 1884 an imperial standard wire-gauge became law and constitutes the legal gauge of this country. It ranges from half an inch to one-thousandth of an inch in diameter. The world-wide use of wire for telegraphic and other electrical purposes is too well known to need comment, one company in America owning no fewer than six hundred and forty-eight thousand miles in their own system. Perhaps, however, as striking a figure as can be adduced in relation to wire is its consumption in the pin-making industry. With but few exceptions, all pins are made from brass wire, and the daily production of pins in Great Britain is placed by competent authorities at fifty millions, of which Birmingham supplies about three-fourths. How this stupendous output is consumed affords matter of no small wonderment; and when the proverbial trifling value of each individual pin is further borne in mind, the interest in this branch of the wire industry will be still further augmented. A point of interest to many of our readers may be noted in connecting our mention of wire with the Forth Bridge, and in pointing out that in the erection of that gigantic structure fully sixty miles of steel wire-rope were temporarily employed. For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. |