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that were styled days of peace." And, since conflict there must be, a thousand times better that the clarion should sound for Sebastopol or Waterloo than that the bylanes should ring "to the yell of the trampled wife," or “chalk and alum and plaster be sold to the poor for bread."

Like In Memoriam, Maud is strongly reminiscent of the poet's early life and environment. Begun during his sojourn in Lincolnshire, it retained the hue of that county, although the major portion of it must have been written in London and Farringford. The scenery is always near

The silent woody places

By the home that gave me birth,

and Holywell Glen, just beyond the poet's house, with its "dreadful hollow," its "red-ribb'd ledges," and its tumbled rocks suggested the story. The coast and the sea are of Lincolnshire also, where the eternal conflict between the waves and the land rages most violently. And the lover from his "own dark garden ground" could hear the incessant tumult, and he listened alternately to

The tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,

and then to

The scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave. Maud must rank as a great poem if only because it sweeps over so large a range, touches so many chords, mingles so many harmonies, and reaches so pregnant a conclusion. It is both human and heroic. It shows man in his strength and weakness, nature in its horror and its sublimity. Perhaps too it confirms the thought of fatalism, stamps us as puppets, blind and resistless as

we are

Moved by an unseen hand at a game

That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed. Yet in teaching the redeeming power of pure love the poem 1 See the Chapter on Holywell Glen in In Tennyson Land.

reaches a height of grandeur. Maud is the most beautiful of Tennyson's conceptions

Maud with her exquisite face,

And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky,
And feet like sunny gems on an English green,
Maud in the light of her youth and her grace,

Singing of Death, and of Honour that cannot die.

She is veritably the "queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls," and there is "none like her, none." Yet Maud is but a shadow cast across the path of a man, and she can only pass away in silence as she came. She is but the music of a man's soul, audible only to the ears of love. She is but a vision of peace and splendour visible to the consecrated eyes of the faithful and the pure. She is but the starry hope of yearning, ardent youth, which glows like a fire for a brief season, and sinks into ashes and dust as the ideal fades, and the world is conqueror.

The monodrama, with its martial vigour, its purity and strength of purpose, came like a waft of fresh air in a spot reeking with pollution. Its lesson was as potential as it was praiseworthy. But these things apart, Maud remains one long exquisite sonata with delicious snatches of melody and pealing harmonies, ever changing in key and time, now soft and lutelike in sweetness, now agitated, stern, and grand in storm, then again subdued, and sinking into cadences beautiful almost beyond realisation. Again, it is the story of a heart-of a heart lacerated with sorrow, and for a time soothed with love, then tortured into madness, and finding hope and salvation eventually in valiant deeds. Said Charles Dickens in one of his many confidences with his readers-"I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and no one can love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield." And if Tennyson had cared to take the world into his confidence it is not unlikely that he would have con

fessed as we have good reason for believing was the fact -that in his heart of hearts he had a favourite child, and that child's name was Maud.1

1 Hain Friswell said: "Tennyson believes Maud to be, as he told certain friends, the best thing he has ever written, and which" (the severe critic added), "certainly has in it more passion of the kind felt by the Baker Street and Westbourne Grove classes than any other of his pieces."-Modern Men of Letters Honestly Criticised (1870).

CHAPTER VIII.

ENOCH ARDEN.

"To look on noble forms

Makes noble thro' the sensuous organism

That which is higher."

-The Princess.

TENNYSON'S tranquil life during these years supplies the biographer with very few details. He was zealously living up to his ideal and striving to miss

The irreverent doom

Of those that wear the Poet's crown.

The revision of old poems and the composition of new appears to have been his chief occupation, though "troops of unrecording friends" helped to make time pleasant at Farringford. His son Hallam was born in 1852, and two years later a second son, Lionel, was added to the family; and it was at this time that the celebrated invitation to the Rev. F. D. Maurice was sent. The lines conveying that invitation have attracted a large share of attention, because they supply us with one of the rare revelations of the poet in his private life-a privacy which we have no desire to invade save with his sanction. But the picture of the home in the Isle of Wight is too valuable to be excluded. "Come," wrote the poet,

Come, when no graver cares employ,
Godfather, come and see your boy,

Where, far from noise and smoke of town,
I watch the twilight falling brown
All round a careless-order'd garden
Close to the ridge of a noble down.

You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine,
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous under a roof of pine:

For pines of grove on either hand,
To break the blast of winter, stand:

And further on the hoary Channel
Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand.

Come, Maurice, come: the lawn as yet

Is hoar with rime, or spongy-wet;

But when the wreath of March has blossom'd,
Crocus, anemone, violet,

Or later, pay one visit here,

For those are few we hold as dear.

The character of this chosen friend, the Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, is sketched in the same poem. He was one of "that honest few Who give the Fiend himself his due," and anathemas had been thundered at him for his candour and his freedom of thought. He had been one of the earliest to recognise Tennyson, and being himself a Trinity man, he was proud of his fellow-collegian. He had been godfather with Henry Hallam, the historian, to the poet's eldest surviving son, and Maurice soon afterwards dedicated to the Laureate his volume of "Theological Essays." "I have maintained in these Essays," he wrote, "that a Theology which does not correspond to the deepest thoughts and feeling of human beings cannot be a true Theology. Your writings have taught me to enter into many of those thoughts and feelings. . . . As the hopes which I have expressed in this volume are more likely to be fulfilled to our children than to ourselves, I might perhaps ask you to accept it as a present to one of your name, in whom you have given me a very sacred interest. Many years, I trust, will elapse before he knows that there are any controversies in the world into which he has entered. Would to God that in a few more he may find that they had ceased! At all events, if he should ever look into

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