all its other gifts originally grow and are continually fed.* The source of true poetry is, perhaps, strong and deep feeling rather than profound thought. Yet it is very necessary that heart and mind should be in close alliance and be fairly balanced, for our English literature affords many examples of the disastrous consequences which result to poetry from the ascendency of the one over the other. The tribunal before which all poetry must be tried is constituted of three judges, Heart, Mind, and Ear, and in a favourable judgement they must be unanimous. Assuredly no poetry will establish a permanent place of the highest order in the estimation of men which either offends healthy feeling, fails to satisfy strong thinking, or does violence to the sense of melody or of artistic beauty of language.

The great poet, like other ruling spirits among men, partly leads and partly follows the tendencies of his time. He feels that which moves his contemporaries as they feel it, only with greater intensity. The vigorous expression which he gives to their sentiments serves both to vivify and strengthen feelings implanted in them partly by nature, partly by the spirit of their age. He thus inspires his contemporaries with fresh vigour at the same time that he reflects the prevailing feelings and thoughts of his time.

No country or period ever had a truer interpreter than the England of the Victorian age in the late Poet Laureate. Lord Tennyson was English to the core. The virtues and the type of heroism that he idealised were essentially English. With him Duty was a passion. In law and wellordered liberty he believed with the whole strength of his soul. Anarchy was abhorrent to his very nature. He considered it the most dangerous enemy of the freedom which he loved. Yet he recognised to the full that in forcible resistance to oppression-nay, even out of the throes of revolutionary violence-have often sprung the beginnings of better things:

'... O, shall the braggart shout

For some blind glimpse of Freedom work itself
Through madness, hated by the wise, to law,
System, and Empire. . .?'

Mr. Stopford Brooke and others appear to think that, a wilder, a more reckless passion would have given a stronger impulse to true poetry than the Moderation so

* Aspects of Poetry, p. 3.

dear to Lord Tennyson. Law and order may be in themselves highly meritorious elements in the State and in society, and yet be better fitted to stir the eloquence of the statesman than to call out the fire of the poet. No one, however, can doubt that in his manly moderation, in his constant sobriety of judgement, Lord Tennyson reflects with absolute fidelity the character of his countrymen. His political ideas and ideals are certainly those which have influenced the statesmen of the Queen's reign-the men to whom two generations of Englishmen have entrusted the government of their country. He has summoned poetry to the aid of statesmanship; and by the beauty of his language and the wisdom of his thought he has done much to fix and perpetuate and strengthen in men's minds the principles which they and he have held dear.

As with politics, so with religion. His poetry is instinct with the doubts and the hopes of thoughtful Englishmen of his day. The supposed antagonism between scientific discovery and religious belief was keenly present to his mind, as to theirs. Like them he was tolerant of every difference of creed. 'Honest doubt' received from him no censure. On the other hand he showed no mercy to 'the 'surface man of theories, true to none,' who in the rejection of all religious belief finds the way open to every self-indulgence and vice. 'Locksley Hall,' The Two Voices,' and 'In Memoriam' show very clearly the attitude of Lord Tennyson towards religion. With those who doubted in a serious spirit he felt every sympathy. With those who either in shallowness of mind or in bitterness of spirit scoffed, and triumphed in their disbelief, his deep nature could have nothing in common. A spiritual hope and belief were strong within him; yet no one knew better than he how spiritual religion had suffered from the rigid definitions in which men had confined it.

'I know that age to age succeeds,

Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,

A dust of systems and of creeds.'*

His was an upward-looking faith as strong and deep as it was wide; and the expression that it found in his poetry was in exact conformity with the spirit of his own countrymen in his own day. Assuredly Tennysonian poetry would not give a true picture of the aspirations and tone of mind of religious England at any period earlier than his own.

*The Two Voices.

Still

less would it represent the prevailing sentiments of his own day in any other country of Europe.

The knowledge and love of nature in detail, so conspicuous in Lord Tennyson's poetry, are also eminently characteristic of our time. He is not satisfied with admiring and describing the more beautiful effects of natural scenery in some general aspect, or the grander effects which the war of elements may produce. He feels the beauty of nature even in its least showy phases. He has watched with the affectionate interest of a true naturalist the animal and vegetable life of our English woods, and downs, and lanes, and fields, and has taught thousands and thousands of his countrymen to see beauty formerly hid from their eyes. Tennyson's treatment of nature is certainly very different from that of the great poets of the first quarter of our century. In 'Childe Harold' and other poems of Lord Byron there are descriptions of sunset, and of storm, of mountain, sea, and lake, which can never be surpassed. Wordsworth, again, appreciated natural scenery in every aspect, and no one more keenly felt its power. To him nature suggested deep thought and wise reflection. Walter Scott had that hearty admiration of the glories of the earth he dwelt in that comes home to every active climber whose eye ranges over a wide tract of country from the summit of a Scottish hill. Each of these poets presents a more or less landscape-like view of nature; and each, it need scarcely be said, uses his power of word-painting for a different purpose- Byron to make his own personality more interesting, as when the ravishing beauty of clear placid Leman' warns him

to forsake

Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring;'

Wordsworth to moralise the spectacle;' Scott to impart to others the keen delight he had himself experienced in the glories unfolded to his eyes and the interest that associations of history or romance added to the scene.

Not even Wordsworth (says Mr. Stopford Brooke), 'who is the mountain poet, could have made us feel the landscape of the English lower lands as Tennyson does in the "May Queen," with our pity for the dying girl woven through it all.' And he quotes the following lines :— 'When the flowers come again, mother, beneath the waning light, You'll never see me more in the long grey fields at night, When from the dry dark wold the summer air blows cool

On the oat grass, and the sword grass, and the bull rush in the pool.'

Millais himself has hardly ever painted the foreground of a landscape with more care for natural detail than Tennyson has shown again and again in the minute accuracy with which he follows Nature. Nor has De Windt given us a truer picture of a heavy English summer day in the lowlying lands of Lincolnshire than Tennyson has painted in the Palace of Art'

'And one, a full-fed river winding slow

By herds upon an endless plain,

The ragged rims of thunder brooding low,
With shadow streaks of rain.'

In October 1890 we had occasion to contrast the personalities of the two great contemporary poets, Tennyson and Browning, and to trace the effects of the training and life of each upon his work. The former was a true son of Cambridge. From the days almost of his boyhood his associates were the very flower of contemporary English culture. Arthur Hallam, Monckton Milnes, Thackeray, and Venables were amongst those whom undergraduate life had made his friends. He lived in England, saw much of his own friends, and cared little for the delights of general society. Browning, on the contrary, spent a large portion of his life abroad. Italy, he himself declared, was his University. His favourite study was the Italian literature of the seventeenth century. He was one of the most sociable of men, and few shone more brightly than he in the London society of his later years. In their choice of subjects, in their thoughts, and in the form of expression with which they clothed them, no two poets could differ more widely.

Tennyson never went down into the obscure and thorny depths of metaphysics and theology; nor did he attempt to express the more dreadful and involved passions of mankind, such as Shakespeare in his tragic worked upon, nor the subtle and distant analogies and phases of human nature in which Browning had his pleasure.'*

Tennyson chose for his subjects and wrote only about that 'which he could express with lucidity of thought and form.'

Mr. Stopford Brooke has presented the public with a deeply interesting study of Lord Tennyson's poetry. His high appreciation of its merit has never led him into meaningless praise. When, on the other hand, the criti

*Stopford Brooke, Introduction.

cism is unfavourable, his observations-whether we agree with them or not-are all carefully considered and deserve equal attention. His own language, often rising into eloquence, delights for its own sake those who either in poetry or in prose are alive to the beauties of the English tongue; and the modest hope with which he concludes his volume-viz. that his study of Lord Tennyson will make 'men who love him love him more, and those who do not ' yet love him find that constant pleasure'--will certainly not be disappointed.

It has been said by way of criticism of Lord Tennyson that he is more eminent as an artist than poet, meaning, we suppose, that the elaborate skill of his execution impresses his readers more than the passion which inspired him-that there is in his poetry more of workmanship than of feeling. It is true that with him the force of passion is restrained; yet with many this restraint does not diminish his power. That Lord Tennyson was an artist, if ever a poet deserved the name, all men agree.

The essential difference of an artist,' says Mr. Stopford Brooke, 'is the love of beauty and the power of shaping it. The greatness of an artist is proportionate to the depth and truth of his love of beauty, to his faithfulness to it, and to his unremitting effort to train his natural gift of shaping it into fuller ease, power, and permanence. As to beauty itself, men talk of natural beauty, of physical, moral, and spiritual beauty, and these term divisions have their use; but at root all beauty is one, and these divided forms of it are modes only of one energy, conditioned by the elements through which it passes. They can all pass into one another, and they can all be expressed in terms of one another.

To define beauty, then, is beyond our power; but we can approach a definition of it by marking out clearly its results on us. What is always true of beauty is this, that wherever it appears it awakens love of it which has no return on self, but which bears us out of ourselves; it stirs either joy or reverence in the heart without bringing with it any self-admiration or vanity; and it kindles the desire of reproducing it, not that we may exult in our own skill in forming it, but that our reproduction of it may awaken emotions in others similar to those which the original sight of beauty stirred in our own hearts-that is, it more or less forces the seer of it into creation. This creation, this representation of the beautiful is art; and the most skilful representation of the ugly-that is, of anything which awakens repulsion, or base pleasure, or horror, which does not set free and purify the soul, or scorn instead of reverence, or which does not kindle in us the desire of reproduction of it that we may stir in others similar emotions to our own-is not art at all. It is clever imitation, it is skill, it is artifice it is not art. It is characteristic of an age which is writhing