which comes on the true heart with advancing years, towards the world of actual man. In the first volume there are indications that the poet, calm as he is, and apart as he seems from the crowded path of human life, is still one of the true spirits who live for and feel with all. The poem of Lady Clara Vere de Vere is a stern lesson to the heartlessness of aristocratic pride, shrouded as it may be under the fairest of forms.

"Clara, Clara Vere de Vere,
If time be heavy on your hands,
Are there no beggars at your gate,
Nor any poor about your lands?
Oh! teach the orphan boy to read,
Or teach the orphan girl to sew,
Pray heaven for a human heart,
And let the foolish yeoman go."

The poems which immediately follow this, The May Queen and New Year's Eve, are practical examples of the truth just enunciated,

"A simple maiden in her flower

Is worth a hundred coats of arms."

The natural beauty of The May Queen, and the exquisite pathos of the New Year's Eve, have made them universally known. In the second volume, the poet seems particularly to have endeavoured to enforce his ideas of the dignity of a virtuous nature, which stands in its own divine worth, far above all artificial distinctions. His Gardener's Daughter, the ballad of Lady Clara, and that most

delightful one of The Lord of Burleigh, all teach it. Lady Godiva is an example of that high devotion to the public good, which is prepared to make the most entire sacrifice of self; and of which history, here and there, amid its mass of selfishness and crime, presents us with some glorious examples-none more glorious than that of the beautiful Godiva. But Locksley Hall and The Two Voices are the most brilliant of all Tennyson's productions, and amongst the most perfect things in the language.

We can scarcely conceive anything more perfectly musical and intrinsically poetical than Locksley Hall. It is the soliloquy of a wronged, high, and passionate nature. The speaker, a young man capable of great things, wars against the false maxims of the present time, yet sees how it is advancing into something better and greater. He perceives how mind is moving forward into its destined empire. He feels and makes us feel how great is this age and this England in which we live. Some of the thoughts and expressions stand prominent even amid the superb beauty of the whole, and have never been surpassed in their felicitous truth and pictorial power. The description of his life at that country hall, and the love of himself and his cousin Amy, are fine; but how much finer these stanzas, the result of the fickle cousin's marrying a mere clod with a title. The certain consequence of the wife's mind, which would have soared and strengthened in the association with his own, sinking to the level of the brute she had allied herself to, is most admirably told How constantly do we see this effect in life, but where has it been, and in so few words, so fully expressed?

"Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring,

And her whisper thronged my pulses with the fulness of the spring.
Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,
And our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips.
O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!
Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!
Is it well to wish thee happy?-having known me-to decline
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!
Yet it shall be: thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.
As the husband is, the wife is; thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.
He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.
What is this? his eyes are heavy: think not they are glazed with wine.
Go to him: it is thy duty: kiss him; take his hand in thine.

It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought:
Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought.
He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand-
Better wert thou dead before me, though I slew thee with my hand!
Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace,
Rolled in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace.
Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!

Cursed be the sickly forms that err from Nature's honest rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool."

With a lover's fancy he would seek comfort in persuading himself that his love was dead, but quickly spurns from him this idea. Every line which follows this-the picture of the repentant wife, and the drunken husband, “hunting in his dreams,” the child that roots out regret, the mother grown into the matron schooling this child, a daughter, into the world's philosophy-all is masterly. Not less so the portraiture of the age

"What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys.
Every gate is thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow;
I have but an angry fancy,-what is that which I should do?

I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground,

When the ranks are rolled in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound.
But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that honour feels,
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels."

How finely, in the next stanzas, are portrayed the expectations of the ardent youth, the light of London, and the imagined progress of scenic and real life!

"Can I but re-live in sadness? I will turn that earlier page.
Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age!
Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,
When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;
Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,
Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field,
And at night along the dusty highway near and nearer drawn,
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn,
And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,
Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men;
Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:
That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be:

Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales:
Heard the heavens filled with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nation's airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm.
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm.,
Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled,
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

So I triumphed, ere my passion sweeping through me left me dry,
Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;
Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint,
Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point:
Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.
Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns."

Disappointed in love, and sickened in hope of civilized life, the speaker dreams, for a moment, of flying to some savage land, and leading the exciting life of a tropical hunter. In the reaction of his thoughts how vividly is expressed the precious preeminence of European existence, with all its attendant evils!

Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,
But I count the grey barbarian lower than the Christian child.
I to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!
Mated with a squalid savage-what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time-

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand and gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon.
Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day :
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

Mother-Age! (for mine I knew not,) help me as when life begun;
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun-

OI see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set;
Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet."

Who shall say, after this, that Alfred Tennyson wants power? There speaks the man of this moving age. There speaks the spirit baptized into the great spirit of progress. In the silence of his meditative retreat the poet sees the world rolling before him, and is struck with the majesty of its mind subduing its physical mass to its uses, and trampling on time, space, and the far greater evilsprejudice, false patriotism, and falser ideas of glory. Brotherhood, peace, and comfort advance out of the school and the shop, and happiness sits securely beneath the guardianship of

"The Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."

Alfred Tennyson has given many a fatal blow to many an old and narrow maxim in his poems; he has breathed into his later ones the generous and the victorious breath of noblest philanthropy, the offspring of the great renovator-the Christian religion. This will give him access to the bosoms of the multitude

"Men his brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new;" and his vigorous song will cheer them at their toil, and nerve them to more glorious efforts. Of the hold which his poetry has already taken on the public heart, a striking instance was given some time ago. The anonymous author of The New Timon stepped out of his way and his subject to represent Tennyson's muse as a puling school-miss The universal outburst of indignation from the press scared the opprobrious lines speedily out of the snarler's pages. A new edition was quickly announced, from which they had wisely vanished.

Perhaps, however, the crown of all Tennyson's verse is The Two Voices. I have said that he is not metaphysical. He is better. Leaving to others to build and rebuild theories of the human mind, Tennyson deals with its palpable movements like a genuine philo

sopher, and one of the highest order, a Christian philosopher The Two Voices are the voice of an animated assurance in the heart, and the voice of scepticism. In this poem there is no person who has passed through the searching, withering ordeal of religious doubts and fears as to the spiritual permanency of our existence and who has not ?—but will find in these simple stanzas the map and history of their own experience. The clearness, the graphic power, and logical force and acumen which distinguish this poem are of the highest order. There is nothing in the poems of Wordsworth which can surpass, if it can equal it. Let us take, as our last quotation, the closing portion of this lyric, the whole of which cannot be read with too much attention. Here the combat with Apollyon in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is most simply and beautifully put an end to by the buoyant spirit of nature, and man walking amid his human ties hand in hand with her and piety.

* Suicide.