Death of the Duke of Wellington, and The Charge of the Light Brigade. He showed his ardent love of England in other ways. His Idylls of the King was a poetic effort to bring to modern minds the chivalric ideal as dimly shadowed in the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Maud was a passionate protest against a selfish indifference to national honor and mere regard for material wealth, and he wrote tragedies intended to reconstruct old English history. In 1884, he was made Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and of Freshwater, so that thereafter he bore the title of Lord Tennyson.

It is impossible to sum up in brief space an estimate of the essence of Tennyson's poetic greatness. In any analysis of it, the purity, elevation, and depth of thought, the pervading quality of imagination, and the constant beauty of structure must primarily be reckoned with. In other words, his mind was amply adequate to supplying him with the most noble and lovely themes, and his mastery over his art enabled him to put them into noble and lovely forms. He gathered up in himself many of the beauties of poets who went before him, and has won the tribute of so much imitation — often by persons no doubt unconscious of imitating that nearly the whole body of English poetry in our second half century has been different because of him.

1892

ENOCH ARDEN.

Enoch Arden appeared as the principal poem of the volume bearing its name in 1864. It is the main product of a period of reaction from the work which dealt, in the Idylls of the King, with the great legends of England. As in other poems of its period, Tennyson attempted to draw near to the actual life of the English people. The sympathetic reader will feel especially in the poem the fitness of the means to the end in view; the many metaphors of the sea, the stress that is laid upon the elements of superstition and the supernatural, — elements well in keeping with the characters of the story. The beauty of the descriptive passages needs no pointing out.

20

LONG lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm; And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands; Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf

In cluster; then a moulder'd church; and higher
A long street climbs to one tall-tower'd mill;
And high in heaven behind it a gray down
With Danish barrows; and a hazelwood,
By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes
Green in a cuplike hollow of the down.

Here on this beach a hundred years ago,
Three children of three houses, Annie Lee,
The prettiest little damsel in the port,
And Philip Ray, the miller's only son,
And Enoch Arden, a rough sailor's lad

15 Made orphan by a winter shipwreck, play'd

7. Danish barrows, burial mounds supposed to date from the Danish incursions into England.

Among the waste and lumber of the shore,
Hard coils of cordage, swarthy fishing-nets,
Anchors of rusty fluke, and boats updrawn;
And built their castles of dissolving sand
20 To watch them overflow'd, or following up
And flying the white breaker, daily left
The little footprint daily wash'd away.

A narrow cave ran in beneath the cliff; In this the children play'd at keeping house. 25 Enoch was host one day, Philip the next,

While Annie still was mistress; but at times Enoch would hold possession for a week: "This is my house and this my little wife." "Mine too," said Philip, "turn and turn about:" 30 When, if they quarrell'd, Enoch stronger made Was master: then would Philip, his blue eyes All flooded with the helpless wrath of tears, Shriek out, "I hate you, Enoch," and at this The little wife would weep for company, 35 And pray them not to quarrel for her sake, And say she would be little wife to both.

But when the dawn of rosy childhood past,
And the new warmth of life's ascending sun
Was felt by either, either fixt his heart
40 On that one girl; and Enoch spoke his love,
But Philip loved in silence; and the girl
Seem'd kinder unto Philip than to him;
But she loved Enoch: tho' she knew it not,
And would if ask'd deny it. Enoch set

before his eyes,

36. A line which skillfully foreshadows the tragedy of the poem.

To hoard all savings to the uttermost,
To purchase his own boat, and make a home
For Annie and so prosper'd that at last
A luckier or a bolder fisherman,

so A carefuller in peril, did not breathe
For leagues along that breaker-beaten coast
Than Enoch. Likewise had he served a year
On board a merchantman, and made himself
Full sailor; and he thrice had pluck'd a life
55 From the dread sweep of the down-streaming seas:
And all men look'd upon him favorably:

And ere he touch'd his one-and-twentieth May
He purchased his own boat, and made a home
For Annie, neat and nestlike, halfway up

60 The narrow street that clamber'd toward the mill.

Then, on a golden autumn eventide,

The younger people making holiday,

With bag and sack and basket, great and small, Went nutting to the hazels. Philip stay'd 65 (His father lying sick and needing him) An hour behind; but as he climb'd the hill, Just where the prone edge of the wood began To feather toward the hollow, saw the pair, Enoch and Annie, sitting hand-in-hand, 70 His large gray eyes and weather-beaten face All-kindled by a still and sacred fire,

That burn'd as on an altar. Philip look'd, And in their eyes and faces read his doom; Then, as their faces drew together, groan'd, 15 And slipt aside, and like a wounded life

Crept down into the hollows of the wood;

54. Full sailor may be taken as equivalent to "able seaman.' 67, 68. Where the woods grew thinner and lighter.

There, while the rest were loud in merrymaking, Had his dark hour unseen, and rose and past Bearing a lifelong hunger in his heart.

90 So these were wed, and merrily rang the bells, And merrily ran the years, seven happy years, Seven happy years of health and competence, And mutual love and honorable toil;

With children; first a daughter. In him woke,
85 With his first babe's first cry, the noble wish
To save all earnings to the uttermost,

And give his child a better bringing-up
Than his had been, or hers; a wish renew'd,
When two years after came a boy to be

20 The rosy idol of her solitudes,

90

While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,
Or often journeying landward; for in truth
Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil
In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,

95 Rough-redden'd with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market-cross were known,
But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp
And peacock-yewtree of the lonely Hall,
100 Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering.

Then came a change, as all things human change Ten miles to northward of the narrow port

94. Osier, i. e. basket.

96. Many English villages have an old stone cross in the market-place.

98. The heraldic device over the portal to the hall, supposed to stand as a guard (warding).

99. A yew-tree cut, after the fashion of old gardening, into the form of a peacock.