The Corner of the Study at Farringford where Tennyson wrote,with his Deerhound “Lufra” and the Terrier “Winks” in the Foreground.From a drawing by W. Biscombe Gardner.
Hallam was at that time a baby, and very soon after their arrival at Farringford beautiful Lionel came to gladden the hearts of his parents. It was on the day of Lionel’s christening that my father paid his first visit to Farringford, and found the family party just returning from church. My father had already been introduced to Tennyson at Lady Ashburton’s house in London, on which occasion he had walked away with Carlyle and had expressed to him his pleasure at meeting so great a man as Tennyson. “Great man,” said Carlyle, “yes, he is nearly a great man, but not quite; he stands on a dunghill with yelping dogs about him, and if he were quite a great man, he would call down fire from Heaven, and burn them up”—“but,” he went on, speaking of his poetry, “he has the grip on it.”
My father had entertained the greatest admiration for Tennyson’s poetry since the day when, both being undergraduates at Christchurch, his friend Charles Wynne brought him the first published volume, saying to him, “There is something new for you who love poetry.” And his delight may be imagined in now having the Poet for a neighbour. The intimacy between Farringford and Swainston grew apace. My mother and Lady Tennyson, though poor health and numerous occupations interfered with their frequent meetings, conceived a very real affection for each other, which wasonly cut short by my mother’s early death, which left Lady Tennyson with a deep feeling and pity for her children.
During the early years of Farringford, it was one of my father’s great and frequent pleasures to ride or drive over in the summer afternoons; he, in turn with her husband, would draw Lady Tennyson in her garden chair, and with the two boys skipping on before them, they would go long expeditions through the lanes, and even up the downs; then back through the soft evening air to dinner, and the long evening of talk and reading which knitted that “fair companionship” and made of it “such a friendship as had mastered time,” and which we may well believe has re-formed itself still more perfectly now that both those beloved souls have “crossed the bar.” The Tennysons sometimes came over to Swainston for a few days, and I remember his being there on the wonderful July night in 1858 when the tail of the great comet passed over Arcturus. His admiration and excitement knew no bounds; he could not sit at the dinner-table, but rushed out perpetually to look at the glorious sight, repeating: “It is a besom of destruction sweeping the sky.”
Little Lionel was that same night taken from his bed to the window, and, opening his sleepy eyes on the unaccustomed splendour, he said, “Am I in Heaven?”
The writing and publication of “Maud” in 1855 was largely due to my father.
Looking through some papers one day at Farringford with his friend, he came upon the exquisite lyric “O that ’twere possible,” and said, “Why do you keep these beautiful lines unpublished?” Tennyson told him that the poem had appeared years before in theTribute, an ephemeral publication, but that it was really intended to belong to a dramatic poem which he had never been able to carry out. My father gave him no peace till he hadpersuaded him to set about the poem, and not very long after, he put “Maud” into his hand.
It was about this time, but I do not remember what year, that Tennyson gave my father the manuscript of “In Memoriam.”[79]He had often asked him to give him a manuscript poem, and he had put him off, but one day at Swainston he asked my father to reach him a particular book from a shelf in the library, and as he did so, down fell the MS. which Tennyson had put there as a surprise. Never was gift more valued and appreciated by its recipient. I have always felt grateful to him for the continual pleasure which it gave my father during the whole of his life.
Tennyson’s visits were eagerly looked forward to by us children. He would talk to us a good deal, and was fond of puzzling and mystifying us in a way that was very fascinating. He would take the younger ones on his knee, and give them sips of his port after dinner, and I remember my father saying to one of my sisters: “Never forget that the greatest of poets has kissed you and made you drink from his glass.”
As I got older I was sometimes allowed to drive over to Farringford with my father, and, need I say, I looked forward to these as the red-letter days of my life. Not only were the talk and intellectual atmosphere intoxicating to me, but I became passionately attached to Lady Tennyson. Praise of her would be unseemly; but I may quote what my father was fond of saying of her, that she was “a piece of the finest china, the mould of which had been broken as soon as she was made.” It was not, however, till after my mother’s death in 1860 that my real grown-up intimacy with them began, and that Farringford became the almost second home which for some years it was to me. During my father’sabsences in London or elsewhere, I was free to go and stay there as often and for as long as I liked, and was almost on the footing of a daughter of the house. I used to go for long walks, sometimes alone with Tennyson, sometimes in the company of other guests, of whom Mr. Jowett was one of the most frequent. I wish I had written down the talks with which he made the hours pass like minutes during our walks. Forgetful of the youth and ignorance of his companion, he would rise to the highest themes, thread his way through the deepest speculations, till I caught the infection of his mind, and the questions of matter and spirit, of space and the infinite, of time and of eternity, and such kindred subjects, became to me the burning questions, the supreme interests of life! But however absorbed he might be in earnest talk, his eye and ear were always alive to the natural objects around him: I have known him stop short in a sentence to listen to a blackbird’s song, to watch the sunlight glint on a butterfly’s wing, or to examine a field flower at his feet. The lines on “The Flower” were the result of an investigation of the “love-in-idleness” growing on a wall in the Farringford garden. He made them nearly on the spot, and said them to me next day. Trees and plants had a special attraction for him, and he longed to see the vegetation of the Tropics. Years ago he scolded my husband more than half in earnest for not having told him in time that he was going to winter in Madeira, that he might have gone with him.
But to return to my girlish days at Farringford! The afternoon walks were followed by the long talks in the firelight by the side of Lady Tennyson’s sofa, talks less eager, less thrilling than those I have recalled; but so helpful, so tender, full of the wisdom of one who had learnt to look upon life and all it embraces from one standpoint only, and that the very highest! Thendinner with the two boys (their long fair hair hanging over their shoulders and their picturesque dresses as they are seen in Mr. Watts’s picture in the drawing-room at Aldworth) waiting as little pages on the guests at table, followed by the delightful dessert, for which, according to the old College fashion, we adjourned to the drawing-room. The meal was seasoned with merry genial talk, unexpected guests arriving, and always finding the same warm welcome, for none came who were not tried and trusted friends. After dessert Tennyson went up to his study[80](the little room at the top of the house, from the leads outside which such sky pageants have been seen, shooting stars, eclipses, and Northern Lights) with any men friends who were in the house. They smoked there for an hour or two, and then came down to tea, unless, as sometimes happened, we all joined them upstairs; and then there was more talk or reading aloud of published or, still better, unpublished poems. He would sometimes read from other poets; Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and some lyrics of Campbell being what he often chose; and he taught me to know and appreciate Crabbe, whom he placed very high in the rank of English poets.
One day Tennyson came behind me as I sat at breakfast, and dropped on my plate the MS. of the “Higher Pantheism” which he had composed, or at any rate perfected, during the night. Another day he took me into the garden to see a smoking yew, and said the lines on it which he had just made and afterwards interpolated in “In Memoriam.” My father was with him when they came upon a bed of forget-me-not in the garden and he exclaimed “the heavens upbreaking through the earth,” the lines which he afterwards applied to the bluebells in the description of the springride of Guinevere and Lancelot to Arthur’s court. Once he pleased and touched me inexpressibly: he was talking of the different way in which friends speak before your face and behind your back, and he said, “Now I should not mind being behind the curtain while L. S. was talking of me, and there are very few of whom I could say that.”
Years went on, and changes came; my father’s re-election to Parliament in 1865 made our seasons in London longer and more regular than they had been, and though there was still constant and delightful intercourse with Farringford during the autumn and winter, there was necessarily less during the Session. Some glorious days there were, however, when at Easter or at Whitsuntide my father went down to Swainston, and I sometimes accompanied him. We always went over to Farringford either to spend a night or two, or to drive back through the spring night with its scented breath and its mad revelry of cuckoos and nightingales vying with each other as to which could outshout the other, and my father, fresh from communion with his friend, would open himself out as he rarely did at any other time or place.
It was about this time that Tennyson and his wife, worried beyond bearing by the rudeness and vulgarity of the tourists, who considered that they could best show admiration for the Poet by entirely refusing to respect his privacy, determined to find another house for themselves during the summer months, and turned their thoughts to Blackdown and its neighbourhood. One summer they rented a farm on Blackdown called, I think, Greyshott, and on a fine morning, April 23, 1868, we stood, a party of some fifteen friends, to see the foundation-stone laid of Aldworth, the new home which, to more recent, though not to the older friends, has become almost as much associated with its owner asFarringford, and received the sorrowful consecration of having been the scene of his passing away.
About this time Tennyson took to coming oftener to London. On one occasion he took me with him to the British Museum, and we did not get beyond the Elgin Marbles, such was their fascination for him. Another day he came to our house at luncheon time; most of the family happened to be out, and he proposed that we should go to the Zoological Gardens. London was at its fullest, and I feared, though I did not say it, that he would not escape recognition, which was of all things what he most hated. However, all went well for some time until we went into the Aquarium, and he became greatly absorbed in the sea monsters, when I heard a whisper in the crowd, “That’s Tennyson,” and knew that in another minute he would be surrounded; so I suddenly discovered that the heat of the Aquarium was unbearable and carried him off unwillingly to a quieter part of the gardens—he never found out my ruse.
My mind lingers willingly on the last years of the sixties. As I look back the two-and-twenty years seem, as did another “two and thirty years,” a “mist that rolls away.” Of the circle of dear friends who were so much to one another some still remain to gladden us with their presence, but how many have gone where “beyond these voices there is peace”—Mr. George Venables, Mr. John Ball, Mr. Browning, Sir F. Pollock, Mr. Brookfield, Mr. Henry Cowper, Mr. Laurence Oliphant. The circle was complete as the Table of Arthur before the fatal quest had made its gaps; here death was the quest, and each one who sought, alas, has found it!
The first to pass away was my father, and as his best friend walked in the garden at Swainston on the day, May 31, 1870, on which he came to see him laid to rest, he made those verses,[81]than which few loveliertributes were ever paid from friend to friend, and which will keep the name of the “Prince of Courtesy” green even in the long years to come.
The autumn and winter ’71-’72 my eldest brother and I spent together at Freshwater. We rented Mrs. Cameron’s little house which opens by a door of communication into the large hall of Dimbola, the house in which she lived. The evening we arrived, she suddenly appeared in our drawing-room saying, “When strangers take this house I keep the door between us locked, with friends never”; and locked it never was. We lived almost as part of the family, and it was a real enjoyment to be in such close intimacy with one of the most original, and at the same time most tender-hearted and generous women I have ever known. She was on very intimate terms at Farringford, and would speak her mind to the Poet in a very amusing way. On one occasion a party of Americans came to Freshwater, and Mrs. Cameron sent them up to Farringford with a note of introduction. Tennyson was tired or busy, and they were not admitted. They returned to Mrs. Cameron full of their disappointment, and she put on her bonnet (I can see her now as she walked through the lanes, her red or blue Chuddah shawl always trailing behind her, and apparently not much the worse for the dust that fringed it), and insisted upon their going back with her to Farringford. Having made her way to Tennyson, she said to him solemnly, “Alfred, these good people have come 3000 miles to see a lion and they have found a bear.” He laughed, relented, and received the strangers most courteously.
Mrs. Cameron’s beautiful white-haired old husband in his royal purple dressing-gown was a most interesting personality. In addition to the large experience of men and things which his many years of official life in India had given him, and which made his societydelightful, he was a very fine classical scholar of the old school, and in his old age, when blindness and infirmity debarred him in great measure from his books, it was his solace to repeat by heart odes of Horace, pages of Virgil, and long passages from the Greek poets.
Easter 1872 brought a bright and merry gathering to Freshwater. One of Mrs. Cameron’s charming relations (they had lived with her for years as adopted daughters) was about to marry, and go out with her husband to India, and the “Primrose wedding” brought a large influx of young people, friends and relations of Mrs. Cameron and the bride, in addition to the visitors who always made Easter a pleasant time. The weather was perfect, the “April airs that fan the Isle of Wight” especially soft and balmy. Parties of twenty or thirty met every evening in Mrs. Cameron’s hall or in the Farringford drawing-room. Nearly every one there knew or got to know Lord and Lady Tennyson. He was in particularly genial health and spirits; he joined the young people in their midnight walks to the sea, in their flower-seeking expeditions, in one of which some one was fortunate enough to find a grape hyacinth in one of the Farringford fields. He read aloud nearly as much as he was asked to, and danced as vigorously as the youngest present at two dances that were given. It was during the first of these dances that a young neighbour became engaged to the lady whom he shortly afterwards married. Very soon after the decisive moment had passed, and when the event was naturally supposed to be a profound secret, Tennyson put the girl’s mother, with whom he happened to be sitting, completely out of countenance by saying, without a suspicion of malice, and without for the moment recognizing the young couple who passed him, “I wot they be two lovyers dear.” When he was shortly afterwards told of the engagement, he twinkled very muchover his rather premature but very apposite announcement.
My marriage took place in the autumn of 1872, and my husband, who already knew the Tennysons, was at once received into their intimacy, and their friendship was henceforth one of the greatest privileges of our joint life. Tennyson and Hallam were present at our wedding, and the former held our eldest boy in his arms when he was but a day or two old.
The Easter of 1873 saw us again at Freshwater with another pleasant meeting of friends. On that occasion Tennyson said to me, “Why do you not ask me to dinner?” It need not be said that we at once gave the invitation, though not a little nervous at the thought of the lodging-house fare and arrangements to which we were bidding him; but our dear old landlady did her very best. We asked a small party (Lady Florence Herbert and Leslie Stephen were our guests) to meet him and Hallam; he was himself in the best of spirits, and our little dinner-party proved a great success.
A few years later the Tennysons took a house in London three or four years running (one spring they had my stepmother’s house in Eaton Place). Tennyson appeared to have in great measure lost his dislike to mixing in general society, and they collected about them a very interesting and varied circle of friends. I cannot help recalling an incident which occurred one evening at their house, which, though painful at the moment, is pleasant to look back upon on account of the affectionate and generous apology it elicited. A large party was at their house one evening, and Tennyson was persuaded to read aloud, and chose the “Revenge.” Something or other, I suppose the “Inquisition Dogs” and the “Devildoms of Spain,” excited him as he read, and by the time he had finished he had worked himself into a state, which I have occasionally, but seldom, seen at othertimes, of fury against the Catholic Church, as exemplified by the Inquisition, persecution of heretics, etc.; in fact, all the artillery of prejudice at which Catholics can afford to laugh. It happened, however, that my husband, one of my sisters, and myself were the only Catholics there, and were sitting together in the same part of the room. As he talked he turned towards us and addressed us personally in a violent tirade which loyalty to our convictions made it impossible for us not to answer, though our attempts at explanation and contradiction were drowned in his fierce and eloquent denunciations. Every one in the room looked very uncomfortable. I myself hardly knew whether to laugh or cry, and was never more relieved than, when his flow of words had exhausted itself, he began to read another poem. Before the end of the evening, however, he felt that his outbreak had not been kind or courteous, and before we left he took us all three into his study, and made so sweet and gracious anamendethat we loved him, if possible, more than ever.
Any one who has read carefully the “Idylls of the King,” “Sir Galahad,” “St. Agnes,” among many of his poems, still more any one who has spoken with him intimately, cannot fail to realize the strong attraction which many Catholic doctrines and practices had for Tennyson, and the reverence with which he regarded the Catholic Church as standing alone among jarring sects and creeds, majestic, venerable, and invulnerable. His mind was also an essentially and intensely religious one, and I know that one of my father’s attractions for him lay in the religious tone ofhismind. On these points, however, I will say no more. In jotting down these few remembrances of a friendship which is amongst my most precious possessions, I settled with myself to refrain entirely from any presentation of what I believed to be Tennyson’s views on theology, metaphysics, orpolitics, no less than from any discussion of his poetic greatness. I want nothing but to sketch themanas he always seemed to me, one of the noblest, truest, and most lovable of God’s creatures, and one who, even without the genius that has crowned his brow with never-fading laurel, must, by weight of character and beauty of soul alone, stand a giant amid his fellow-men!
We spent the Christmas holidays of 1890-91 at Freshwater with our five children; not one of them will forget the delightful intercourse with Farringford during those weeks, and the Christmas Tree arranged by Mrs. Hallam Tennyson for her little Lionel in the large room known as the ball-room.[82]Kind words and presents were showered on every one, and I think the beloved grandparents enjoyed it as much as their fourteen-months-old grandson, as they sat in the midst of their servants and cottagers (some of whom were amongst the oldest of their friends), and the guests, little and great, whom they had asked to share their Christmas festival. Our two eldest children have a more precious remembrance of that time and the following Easter, which we also spent at Freshwater, for Tennyson read aloud to them for the first and only time. To our girl he read “Old Roä” and the “Bugle Song,” and to our boy the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.” He read this in April 1891; it was the last time I heard him read, and I look upon it as a special act of kindness; he said he did not like to read to children—they did not understand, were bored—and he only yielded to my strong entreaties. If, however, he saw, as I think he did, the flushed cheeks and big tearful eyes of our fourteen-year-old schoolboy, he must have felt that he had a listener whodidunderstand and appreciate!
Through the early part of the winter of 1890Tennyson was remarkably well, walking in the morning with my husband and other friends, and taking long walks in the afternoon up and down the ball-room, when he liked to have one or two companions who would amuse him, and whom he would amuse with witty stories andbons mots. He had always a great pleasure in racy anecdotes, and the humorous side of life, and during the last years this increased, so that his friends treasured up every good story they heard to repeat to him at their next meeting.
Towards the end of the Christmas holidays Tennyson caught cold, and fears of a return of gout and bronchitis confined him to his room. My husband had already returned to London, and I was remaining only a few days longer and thinking sadly enough that I should not be able to see Tennyson again before I left, when on one of the last evenings I was spending at Farringford, he sent for me to his room and then, to my delighted surprise, proposed to read to me. I demurred, fearing it might be bad for him, but he insisted, and for half an hour read me one unpublished poem after another,[83]his voice nearly as strong as I had ever known it, and it seemed to me even more pathetic and beautiful.
That Easter of 1891, among many pleasant recollections of Farringford and of the group of friends who paid their daily visit there, has one which I like to set against the stories of Tennyson’s unapproachableness and gruffness to those who went to see him, which are so often circulated, and which, in nine cases out of ten, meant that those who presented themselves to him had chosen an unfortunate time, or were in some respect deficient in tact or politeness. An American friend, professor of literature at Harvard, was staying with us. His admiration and veneration for the great master of verse were unbounded, and he would, I feel sure, have crossed the Atlantic merely to see and speak with him.The morning after his arrival, my husband took him to Farringford, where they found Tennyson somewhat annoyed by a communication from an unknown American admirer, enclosing a photograph of the Poet, upon which he requested him to sign his name; the coolness of the request being heightened by the fact that the sender had posted his letter unstamped. My husband said to his friend, “Now, M., here’s your opportunity; put down sixpence and pay the national debt, and Tennyson will sign you the receipt on this photograph.” He immediately took the joke, laughed, bade the professor take back his sixpence, and signed the photograph for him.
On one of the last days we were at Freshwater that Easter, Tennyson met our youngest child of five in the road, and addressed her, to her great amusement: “Madam! you’ve a damask rose on either cheek, and another on your forehead; rosy lips, golden hair, and a straw bonnet.”
I never again saw the household at Farringford after April 1891. Once more we were at Aldworth in October of that year, when Tennyson signed for us a photograph from Mr. Watts’s last picture. He was tired before we left and had gone to rest in his room, but I begged Hallam to let me go in to wish him good-bye. Had I known that itwasgood-bye, and that for the last time I looked on his face and kissed his dear hands, what could I have said? Never could I express the sorrowing love, the immense gratitude, which overflow my heart as I think of my father’s friend and mine!
The following letter was written by Tennyson to Catherine Lady Simeon after the death of his friend:
Aldworth,June 27th, 1870.My dear Lady Simeon—Of course nothing could be more grateful to me than some memorial of my much-lovedand ever-honoured friend, the only man on earth, I verily believe, to whom I could, and have more than once opened my whole heart; and he also has given me in many a conversation at Farringford in my little attic his utter confidence. I knew none like him for tenderness and generosity, not to mention his other noble qualities, and he was the very Prince of Courtesy; but I need not tell you this; anything, little book, or whatever you will choose, send me or bring when you come; and do pray come on the 4th July, and we will be all alone; and Louie can come, when she will, and you can spare her.—Believe me, always affectionately yours,A. Tennyson.
Aldworth,June 27th, 1870.
My dear Lady Simeon—Of course nothing could be more grateful to me than some memorial of my much-lovedand ever-honoured friend, the only man on earth, I verily believe, to whom I could, and have more than once opened my whole heart; and he also has given me in many a conversation at Farringford in my little attic his utter confidence. I knew none like him for tenderness and generosity, not to mention his other noble qualities, and he was the very Prince of Courtesy; but I need not tell you this; anything, little book, or whatever you will choose, send me or bring when you come; and do pray come on the 4th July, and we will be all alone; and Louie can come, when she will, and you can spare her.—Believe me, always affectionately yours,
A. Tennyson.
ByAubrey de Vere
ByArthur Sidgwick, Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
(Read in the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, October 30, 1909.[84])
We are met here to-day to do honour to the memory and the life’s work of one of the greatest of Trinity’s sons, who has also won for himself—few lovers of poetry here or anywhere can feel a doubt—a high and secure place in the glorious roll of English Poets, that roll which records the poetic achievements of over 500 years.
In accepting (with whatever misgivings) the request of the College authorities to speak some preliminary words in appreciation of the Poet, I do not propose to deal in any detail with the history of his life and work, on which the biography has thrown such interesting and welcome light. The most that can here be attempted is to select a few aspects and illustrations of Tennyson’s life-long devotion to his art, such as may serve to bring out something of those gifts and qualities which, wherever English poetry is read, are felt to give to his work its special charm and value.
Though I must pass the early years almost in silence, I cannot refrain from quoting the delightful tale, first made known (I believe) by Miss Thackeray,[85]how at the age of five the Poet was seen with outspreadarms in a high wind, sailing gaily along and shouting his first line of poetry
I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind
—he did indeed all his life hear that voice and all other Nature-voices; and also the other tale of ten years later, how on the news of Byron’s death (in 1824) the boy went out, desolate, and carved the sad tidings on the sandstone, and (to use his own words) “thought everything over and finished for every one, and that nothing else mattered.”
Such despairing grief has seemed to some readers extravagant, to be excused on the plea of youth—he was only fifteen: but it must not be forgotten that Byron’s death was the final blow of a triple fatality such as finds no parallel in the history of literature. Three men of striking genius and rich poetic gifts—Byron, Shelley, and Keats—were all prematurely lost to the world within four years (1821-4). The fervid sorrow of the impulsive and gifted boy of fifteen, so far from being extravagant, must have been shared by countless readers of all ages who cared for poetry, not in England only.
It is true that as the years went on the youthful sympathy of Tennyson with what has been called the Revolutionary poetry was materially modified—perhaps especially in the case of Shelley. Yet there is a striking letter of the date 1834—when Shelley had been dead twelve years, and Tennyson was twenty-five—which should not be forgotten. Henry Taylor had attacked the Byron-Shelley school of poetry; and Tennyson, while not disputing much of his general judgment, adds this penetrating comment: “It may be that he (Taylor) does not sufficiently take into consideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however mistaken they may be, did yet give theworldanother heart and new pulses, and so we are kept going.”
Matthew Arnold was a fine critic and a poet of high distinction, but I have always felt, if we compare his somewhat severe attitude towards the earlier school with that of Tennyson, that it was the latter who showed the truer insight, the wider sympathy, and the juster appreciation.
Of his Cambridge life, 1828-30, two main points stand out: the grievous want he felt of any real stimulus or inspiration in the instruction provided by the authorities; and, secondly, the remarkable group of distinguished men of his own age with whom his college life was passed. As to the first, the scathing lines written at the time, and published with his express consent in the biography, are more eloquent than any description could be. After naming all the glories of the Colleges—their portals, gardens, libraries, chapels, “doctors, proctors and deans”—“all these,” he cries, “shall not avail you when the Daybeam sports, new-risen over Albion ...” and the poem ends with the reason:
Because your manner sortsNot with this age wherefrom ye stand apart,Because the lips of little children preachAgainst you,—you that do profess to teachAnd teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.
On the other hand, this lack (of official wisdom) was more than supplied by the friends with whom he lived—James Spedding, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), Trench, Alford, Brookfield, Blakesley, Thompson (afterwards Master), Merivale, Stephen Spring-Rice, J. Kemble, Heath, C. Buller, Monteith, Tennant, and above all Arthur Hallam. Thirty-five years later Lord Houghton justly said of this group of friends that “for the wealth of their promise they were a body of men such as this University has seldomcontained.” To this should be added the special influence of the “Apostles,” to which Society most of these friends belonged, who had organized from the first regular weekly meetings for essays and discussions, where no topic was barred, and speech was absolutely free. The immense stimulus of such discussion to thought, to study, to readiness and power of argument, to widening the range of intellectual interests and literary judgment and appreciation, must be obvious to all. And we must not forget that the years covered by young Tennyson’s residence at Cambridge were precisely the period of the keenest intellectual stir and the stormiest political warfare that preceded the great Reform Bill.
To return to the poetry. Passing over the purely juvenilePoems by two Brothersprinted in his eighteenth year, we have, in 1830, the first book of poems which have partially survived the mature and fastidious taste which suppressed so much of the early work. Even here, half the pieces have been withdrawn, and much of the rest re-written: what remains is rather slight—the Isabels and Claribels and Adelines and Lilians and Eleanores, poems which in some critics’ views border on the trivial. Really they should be regarded as experiments in lyric measures: and the careful student will note the signs of the poet’s fine ear and keen eye for nature: but the depths were not sounded.
Two years later came the second volume (1832). Again much has been withdrawn, much re-written: but when in this collection we find “Œnone,” “The Palace of Art,” “A Dream of Fair Women,” and “The Lotos-eaters,” we see that we have the real poet at last.
“The Palace of Art” is an attempt to trace the Nemesis of selfish culture, secluding itself from social human life and duty. After three years of theseexclusive delights, the man’s outraged nature—or conscience if you will—reasserts itself in a kind of incipient madness: the soul of him sees visions. Then a weird passage:
But in dark corners of her palace stoodUncertain shapes; and unawaresOn white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood,And horrible nightmares,And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame,And, with dim fretted foreheads all,On corpses three-months-old at noon she came,That stood against the wall.
The horrors, like Gorgons and Furies of ancient poets, are perhaps a trifle too material; but in the description of the Nemesis there are touches of real power, which at least are impressive and arresting.
“Œnone” is perhaps the most absolutely beautiful of these early poems, and for the triumph of melodious sound, and finished picturesqueness of description, the opening lines are unsurpassed. We should also note that it took more than one edition to bring it to its present perfection of form. It is very well known, but no one will object to hear it again:
There lies a vale in Ida, lovelierThan all the valleys of Ionian hills.The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,And loiters, slowly drawn. On either handThe lawns and meadow-ledges midway downHang rich in flowers, and far below them roarsThe long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravineIn cataract after cataract to the sea.Behind the valley topmost GargarusStands up and takes the morning: but in frontThe gorges, opening wide apart, revealTroas and Ilion’s column’d citadel,The crown of Troas.
Before I pass on from “Œnone,” I may perhaps add a word or two on Tennyson’s classical poetry generally, and his debt to the great ancient masterpieces.
He was, perhaps, not exactly a scholar in what I may call the narrow professional sense; but in the broadest and deepest and truest sense he was agreatscholar. Direct imitations of classical form, even when they show such power and poetry as Swinburne’s “Atalanta” and “Erechtheus,” have always something artificial about them. But in all Tennyson’s classic pieces—“Œnone,” “Ulysses,” “Demeter,” “Tithonus,” the legendary subjects—and in the two historic subjects, “Lucretius” and “Boädicea,” the classical tradition is there with full detail, but by the poet’s art it is transmuted. “Œnone” is epic in form, the rest are brief monodramas; the material is all ancient, and in many subtle ways the spirit; the handling is modern and original. In translations—too few—Tennyson can only be called consummate: his version of one passage of theIliad(viii. 552) makes all other translations seem second-rate. Let me quote a few lines:
And these all night upon the bridge of warSat glorying; many a fire before them blazed:As when in heaven the stars about the moonLook beautiful, when all the winds are laid,And every height comes out, and jutting peakAnd valley, andthe immeasurable heavensBreak open to their highest,[86]and all the starsShine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart:So many a fire between the ships and streamOf Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,A thousand on the plain; and close by eachSat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds,Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.
The passage, let me add, is a crucial test of the power of a translator, for this reason: it is a plain, simple description of the Trojan camp-fires in the darkness, with a simile or comparison of the sight to a clearance of the sky at night and the sudden shining of the multitude of stars. With the infallible instinct of GreekPoetry there is a rapid lift in the style, a sudden glorious phrase ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ, to suggest adequately the magnificent sight of the sudden clearance. It is this effect that is difficult to give in the translation; and it is exactly this splendid climax that Tennyson’s incomparable rendering, “And the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest,” so perfectly conveys.
Again, in the metrical imitations—which are deliberately somewhat in the vein of sport and artifice—Tennyson alone, it seems to me, has exactly done what he intended, and shown what English effects can be produced by a master’s hand, even in these unfamiliar measures.
Of the serious classic pieces one of the most beautiful and moving is “Tithonus.” The tale is familiar: the beautiful youth Tithonus was beloved by the goddess of the Dawn, and her love bestowed immortality on him;but they both forgot to ask for immortal youth. So he grew old: and the pathos of the boon, granted by love at love’s request, thus turning out a curse, is the motive of the tale. He speaks:
Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:How can my nature longer mix with thine?Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, coldAre all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feetUpon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steamFloats up from those dim fields about the homesOf happy men that have the power to die,And grassy barrows of the happier dead.Release me, and restore me to the ground;Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;I earth in earth forget these empty courts,And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
A great scholar has said that it is one of the most incomparable powers of poetryto make sad things beautiful, and so to go some way towards healing the sorrow in the reader’s heart. He was speaking ofGreek Tragedy; but there is, I think, a deep truth in the saying, and it is not confined to that particular form of poetry. And I know no better instance of the truth than the singularly beautiful poem quoted above.
But the classic influences are, of course, not limited to the avowed borrowings from ancient legend. There are constantly lines in Tennyson where the student of ancient poetry recognizes a phrase—a turn—an echo—beautiful in themselves, and giving a special pleasure to the instructed reader; such a line as “When the first matin-song hath wakened loud,” which occurs in the “Address to Memory”—the striking early poem containing the description of his Somersby home—and is itself an exquisitely turned translation from Sophocles’Electra. So again we have an echo from Homer through Virgil, in the half-playful line, “This way and that dividing the swift mind”; or, again, the vivid simile from Theocritus in the bold description:
And arms on which the standing muscles sloped,As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,Running too vehemently to break upon it.[87]
—where the reader with an ear will note the bold metrical variation adding so much to the effect. So again the Poet himself has told us how the famous phrase for the kingfisher, “The sea-blue bird of March,” arose one day when he was haunted by the lovely stanza of Alcman (Greek lyric poet) about the “halcyon” whom he calls “the sea-blue bird of spring.” The fact is that Tennyson had an inborn instinct for the subtle power oflanguage, and for musical sound—in a word, for that insight, finish, feeling for beauty in phrase and thought andthing, and that perfection of form, which, taken all together, we call poetry, and he is, like Virgil and Milton, a true son of the Greeks: and if his open imitations are few, the influence of the springs from which he drank is none the less powerful and pervading.
In 1842 came a carefully revised selection of the earlier books—he was always revising and improving—along with a large number of new poems.
I will pass over the English Idylls, which, in spite of beautiful touches, have never as a whole appealed to me. But, setting these aside, there are a few pieces which I cannot pass by without a word. They are “Love and Duty,” the political poems, and songs. “Morte d’Arthur” I leave over till we reach the Idylls.
“Love and Duty” is a passionate tragedy, the parting of two lovers at the call of duty. Perhaps the high-wrought pathos is a sign of youth; but youth may be a strength as well as a weakness; and the lines are surely of extraordinary beauty and force. I will quote the last passage, for a reason which will appear:
Should my Shadow cross thy thoughtsToo sadly for their peace, remand it thouFor calmer hours to Memory’s darkest hold,If not to be forgotten—not at once—Not all forgotten. Should it cross thy dreams,O might it come like one that looks content,With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth,And point thee forward to a distant light,Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heartAnd leave thee freër, till thou wake refresh’dThen when the first low matin-chirp hath grownFull quire, and morning driv’n her plow of pearlFar furrowing into light the mounded rack,Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea.
Certain critics have found fault with the splendid description of Dawn, as being untrue to nature; a lover in such a crisis, they think, would not be concerned withsuch images. I regard this suggestion as wholly at fault. The tragedy, the parting, has come to pass: the vision of dawn is ahopeforher, now that the new life, apart from each other, has to begin for both of them. If the broken love was all, if they could not look beyond, the parting would have been different—like Lancelot and Guinevere—“Stammering and staring; a madness of farewells.” But here the note is higher. The passion barred from its issue rushes into new channels, and the exalted mood finds its only adequate vent in the rapturous vision of a future dawn, the symbol of his hopes for her, those hopes into which his sacrificed love is translated.
In the political poems we have a new departure. It is easy to idealize freedom, revolution, or war: and the ancients found it easy to compose lyrics on kings, athletes, warriors, or other powerful persons. From the days of Tyrtaeus and Pindar, to Byron, Shelley, and Swinburne, one or other of these themes has been the seed of song. But the praise of ordered liberty, of settled government, of political moderation, is far harder to idealize in poetry. It has been the peculiar aim of Tennyson to be the constitutional, and in this sense the national, poet: and it is his peculiar merit and good fortune to have succeeded in giving eloquent and forcible expression to the ideas suggested by these aims.
I will not quote the poems about “the Falsehood of extremes,” or “the land of just and old renown where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent,” because these poems, terse and forcible summaries as they are, have suffered, like other epigrammatic maxims in verse, from vulgarizing quotation. It is not the Poet’s fault in the least; in fact it is due to his very merits—to the memorable brevity, truth, and point of the phrasing. I will quote another—perhaps the most remarkable—of these political poems, “Lovethou thy land.” It is close packed with thought, and must have been especially hard to write, since the Poet’s problem was to express in terse and picturesque and imaginative language what at bottom is philosophic and even prosaic detail. Nevertheless, where the material lends itself at all to imaginative handling we get effects that are impressive and even superb. Take a few lines—I cannot quote at length:
Oh yet, if Nature’s evil starDrive men in manhood, as in youth,To follow flying steps of TruthAcross the brazen bridge of war—If New and Old, disastrous feud,Must ever shock, like armed foes,And this be true, till Time shall close,That Principles are rain’d in blood;Not yet the wise of heart would ceaseTo hold his hope thro’ shame and guilt,But with his hand against the hilt,Would pace the troubled land, like Peace;Not less, tho’ dogs of Faction bay,Would serve his kind in deed and word,Certain, if knowledge bring the sword,That knowledge takes the sword away.
The last couplet seems to me—where all is powerful and imaginative—to be a master-stroke of terse and pointed expression. It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that it sums up human history in regard to one point—namely, the disturbing and even desolating effect of the new Political Idea, until its triumph comes, bringing a higher and more stable adjustment, and a peace more righteous and secure.
Far more widely known than these didactic poems, rich as they are in poetry and thought, are the patriotic odes—the three greatest being the poems on the Duke of Wellington, the “Revenge,” and Lucknow.
The ode on the Duke is a noble commemoration-poem, grave and stately and solemn—a worthy expressionof “the mourning of a mighty nation” with a musical and dignified sorrow—a terse and vivid reference to the Duke’s exploits—a fine imaginative passage where he pictures the dead Nelson asking who the newcomer is, and the stately answer—a striking tribute to the simple and noble character of the dead hero—and then this:
A people’s voice! we are a people yet.Tho’ all men else their nobler dreams forget,Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers;Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly setHis Briton in blown seas and storming showers...O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul,Of Europe, keep our noble England whole,And save the one true seed of freedom sownBetwixt a people and their ancient throne...For, saving that, ye help to save mankindTill public wrong be crumbled into dust,And drill the raw world for the march of mind,Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just.
Again, for the judgment of the poem, thedateis important. It was written only four years after the European earthquake of 1848, and only one year after the Coup d’État. The allusions are not mere commonplaces: they deal with live issues. It is not too much to say that in the great ode Tennyson had a subject after his own heart, and that he has done it magnificent justice.
Of the “Revenge” I will quote one passage, because it contains what always strikes me asthemost wonderful effect ofsoundin poetry to be found anywhere. The whole poem, I may observe, is full of novel and effective handling of metre: but this is the most remarkable. It occurs in the description of the rising storm in which the gallant little ship went down:
And they mann’d the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew,And away she sail’d with her loss, and long’d for her own;When a wind from the lands they had ruin’d awoke from sleep,And the water began to heave, and the weather to moan,And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter’d navy of Spain,And the little Revenge herself went down by the island cragsTo be lost evermore in the main.
Lastly, in the 1842 volume, there was a little song without a title, which will certainly live as long as the English language.
In 1833, nine years before the volume appeared, had died abroad suddenly the rarely-gifted youth who was bound to Tennyson by the double tie of being his best-loved friend and the betrothed of his sister. The body had been brought home for burial by the sea at a little place called Clevedon.
This is the song:
Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!And I would that my tongue could utterThe thoughts that arise in me.O well for the fisherman’s boy,That he shouts with his sister at play!O well for the sailor lad,That he sings in his boat on the bay!And the stately ships go onTo their haven under the hill;But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,And the sound of a voice that is still!Break, break, break,At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!But the tender grace of a day that is deadWill never come back to me.
There is something in the magical expression of deep love and sorrow in these lines—with the swift and vivid touches of scenery, sympathetic and suggestive—which we can only compare to the few greatest outbursts of passionate regret in poetry.
Five years later came “The Princess” (1847). Theidea—a bold design—was to treat, by poetic and half-playful narrative, the comparative intellectual and moral natures of men and women, and the right method of education. The Poet’s views may perhaps to-day seem somewhat old-fashioned, the truths that he suggests or enunciates, in very finished and beautiful language, are controversial, and suffer from the inevitable failing of such writing, viz., that the issues of the strife have changed: experience has shown the forecasts, the fears, and the prophetic satire to be misplaced: and what seemed important truths have turned out to be prejudices or irrelevant platitudes.[88]
The one thing that is consummate in “The Princess” is the handful of little songs that come as interludes between the acts. They are so well known that they need no quotation: their titles will suffice: “As through the land at eve we went,” “Sweet and low,” “The splendour falls,” “Tears, idle tears,” “Thy voice is heard thro’ rolling drums,” “Home they brought her warrior dead,” “Ask me no more.”
The extraordinary effect of these songs is not due only to their marvellous poetic force and finish and variety, but perhaps even more to the illuminating and pointed contrast between the true and deep and permanent realities of human experience—life, death, love, joy, and sorrow—each of which is touched in turn in these exquisite little pictures, and on the other handthe fantastic unreality (in the Poet’s view) of the Princess’s ideals and experiment.
If I must quote one passage, let it be abridged from the shepherd’s song which the Princess reads:
Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:·······For Love is of the valley, come thou downAnd find him; by the happy threshold, he,Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,Or red withspirted purple of the vats,[89]Orfoxlike[90]in the vine; nor cares to walkWith Death and Morning on the silver horns...But follow; let the torrent dance thee downTo find him in the valley; let the wildLean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leaveThe monstrous ledges there to slope, and spillTheir thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,That like a broken purpose waste in air:So waste not thou; but come; for all the valesAwait thee; azure pillars of the hearthArise to thee; the children call, and IThy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,The moan of doves in immemorial elms,And murmuring of innumerable bees.
This is the real idyll, with its central note oflove, and wonderful beauty of sound, and vivid vision of every detail of Nature’s sights and life. It suggests a world where all is fresh and sweet, and beautiful and interesting, and simple and wholesome and harmonious.
The year 1850 was marked by three great events in the personal history of Tennyson: his marriage, the publication of his greatest work, “In Memoriam,” and his acceptance of the laureate crown of poetry in succession to Wordsworth, who died in the spring.
When I say that “In Memoriam” is Tennyson’s greatest work, I am of course aware that it is only a personal opinion on a disputable point. But I incline to think that most lovers of poetry would agree that “InMemoriam” isthe oneof all the Poet’s works the loss of which would be the greatest and most irreparable to poetry.
In the grave and solemn stanzas with which the poem opens, he calls the songs that followwild and wandering cries, confusions of a wasted youth. But in truth they are the expression of the deepest and most heartfelt sorrow: the most musical and imaginative outpouring of every mood, and every trouble, of a noble love and regret: the cries of a soul stricken with doubt born of anguish, and darkened with shadows of disbelief and despair: the deeper brooding over the eternal problems of life, thought, knowledge, religion: the gradual groping toward a faith rather divined than proved, and slowly passing through storm into peace.
The poem took seventeen years to write, and when it appeared the Poet was at the summit of his great powers. His instinct chose a metre at once strong, simple, fresh, flexible, and grave, and noble—equally adapted to every mood, every form of thought or feeling—the passionate, the meditative, the solemn, the imaginative—for description, argument, aspiration, even for prayer. The tone varies: there are lighter and deeper touches: but it is hardly too much to say, there is not an insignificant stanza, nor a jarring note, from beginning to end.
In a poem where all is so familiar—which has meant and means so much to all who care for poetry—it is difficult to quote. I will take a few stanzas, so chosen, if possible, as to show somewhat of the variety, the range, the subtlety, the charm, and the power of this great work.
He goes to the house in London where the dead friend lived: the gloom without typifies and harmonizes with the darkness of his sorrowful thoughts.
Dark house, by which once more I standHere in the long unlovely street:Doors, where my heart was wont to beatSo quickly, waiting for a hand,—A hand that can be clasped no more—Behold me—for I cannot sleep—And like a guilty thing I creepAt earliest morning to the door.He is not here; but far awayThe noise of life begins again,And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rainOn the bald street breaks the blank day.
One of the most important motives concerns the doubts raised by the new truths which science was beginning to teach, almost seeming to make in a sense a new heaven and a new earth. The old simple beliefs seemed to the Poet threatened—these misgivings are evil dreams:Natureseems to say:
... A thousand types are gone:I care for nothing, all shall go.Thou makest thine appeal to me;I bring to life, I bring to death;The spirit does but mean the breath:I know no more...
Then the Poet breaks out:
And he, shall he,Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,Such splendid purpose in his eyes,Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer—Who trusted God was love indeed,And love Creation’s final law—Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and clawWith ravine, shriek’d against his creed—Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,Who battled for the True, the Just,Be blown about the desert dust,Or seal’d within the iron hills?...O life as futile, then, as frail!O for thy voice to soothe and bless!What hope of answer, or redress?Behind the veil, behind the veil.
He will not accept the suggestions which seem to empty human life of its deepest meanings. There must be some other solution.
One more quotation of a different kind—the common sad thought, never so beautifully expressed, of the places we have loved when bereft of our daily loving care—then passing into other hands and forgetting us, and becoming at last to others what they have been to us.
It is in these common universalhumanthemes that Tennyson with his exquisite musical touch, and sympathy, and unerring choice of significant detail, reaches the heart of every reader.
Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway,The tender blossom flutter down,Unloved, that beech will gather brown,This maple burn itself away:Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair,Ray round with flames her disk of seed,And many a rose-carnation feedWith summer spice the humming air:Unloved, by many a sandy bar,The brook shall babble down the plain,At noon or when the lesser wainIs twisting round the polar star.
(Omitting a stanza.)
Till from the garden and the wildA fresh association blow,And year by year the landscape growFamiliar to the stranger’s child.As year by year the labourer tillsHis wonted glebe, or lops the glades,And year by year our memory fadesFrom all the circle of the hills.
I can quote no more.
The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a new hope and faith—in short, to a new life. The marks of what it has passed throughare seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature, and insight, and scope. Thesoulhas grown and strengthened, we may almost say.
In short, the poem is the inner history of a soul: our deepest feelings, our hopes, our fears, our longings, our weaknesses, our difficulties, all find penetrating, sympathetic, enlightening expression—terse, melodious, inspiring, deeply suggestive—in a word, we feel the magic of poetry.
I have no time left to deal with the large work, which occupied many years, “The Idylls of the King.” It is a series—in blank verse, always melodious and often exquisite, giving the main incidents of the old Arthurian legend, which as a boy he had read with delight in old Malory’s prose epic.
I must content myself with two brief references.
The first idyll, “Gareth and Lynette,” is not in itself one of the most interesting[91]—dealing chiefly as it does with the picture of the eager boy, anxious to be one of Arthur’s knights, who serves a year in menial place as a test of his obedience: but there is one passage which ought never to be omitted in speaking of Tennyson, viz. the answer of the seer when the boys ask him if the castle is enchanted.
The seer answers ironically, yet with a deep meaning, that itisenchanted:
For there is nothing in it as it seemsSaving the King; tho’ some there be that holdThe King a shadow, and the city real.
Then he tells them about thevows: which if they fear to take, he warns them
Pass not beneath this gateway, but abideWithout, among the cattle of the field,For an ye hear a music, like enowThey are building still, seeing the city is builtTo music,therefore never built at all,And therefore built for ever.
Beneath the strangely beautiful surface meaning of these lines there lies the deep allegoric meaning that often what seems visionary is in truth a spiritual and eternal reality. It brings to mind the wonderful lines of Browning (in “Abt Vogler”):
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,The passion that left the earth to lose itself in the sky,Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;Enough that he heard it once, we shall hear it by and by.
The other point concerns the end of the poem. The last section is the Passing of Arthur; the old fragment “Morte d’Arthur” enlarged. One notable addition occurs at the very end.
In the earlier version of the fragment, after Arthur had passed away on the dark lake, with him the last hope also disappears.
We are only told:
Long stood Sir Bedivere,Revolving many memories, till the hullLook’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,And on the mere the wailing died away.
In the fragment the end was tragic: the noble attempt failed; the hero and inspirer passed away, his aim defeated, his comrades slain or scattered, his life and efforts vain.
But in the final shape comes a new and very significant end:
Then from the dawn it seem’d there came, but faint,As from beyond the limit of the world,Like the last echo born of a great cry,Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice,Around a king returning from his wars.Thereat once more he[92]moved about, and clombEv’n to the highest he could climb—and saw,Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the KingSomewhere far off, pass on and on, and goFrom less to less, and vanishinto light.And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.
We feel, as we are meant to feel, that though the death of a noble soul, after unequal war with ill, is deeply sad—fitly pictured with sorrowful sounds and darkness of night—yet the great spirit cannot wholly die: the night breaks into a new day; and the day will be brighter for those who are left, because of the efforts and memories of the leader who is no more.
Tennyson is without doubt, from first to last, one of the great poetic artists. He is not often an inspired singer like Shelley, but he has other gifts which Shelley lacked—a self-restraint, an artistic finish, a fine and mature taste, a deep reverence for the past, a pervading sympathy with the broad currents of the best thought and feeling of the time. Sometimes this is (as we have seen) a weakness, but it is also the source of his greatest strength. He has not, like Wordsworth, given us a new insight, what I may almost call a new religion: but he has a wider range than Wordsworth, and a surer poetic touch. Wordsworth may be the greater teacher; for many of us he has opened a new world: he has touched the deepest springs of our nature. But Tennyson has left us gifts hardly less rare and precious. He has refined, enriched, beautified, in some sense almostremade our poetic language; he has shown that the classic eighteenth-century finish is not incompatible with the nineteenth-century deeper and wider thought: and, in a word, he has inwoven the golden thread of poetry with the main texture of the life, knowledge, feeling, experience, and ideals of the years whereof we are all alike inheritors.