triumph, and now that he has passed from among us "to where beyond these voices there is peace," those last jubilant words will ring in our ears and echo down the ages. We hear the poet and we see the hero, and we rejoice that his last words were as good and true, and his teaching as plain and pure, as ever they were. He fitly finished his work: revealing to us his surpassing strength and grandeur to the close, and departing with a cherished message of hope and trust.

1

THACKERAY once said to Bayard Taylor, "Tennyson is the wisest man I know." His wisdom was of no common order. It manifested itself in surprising ways, lurking in unexpected expressions, and taking a sudden turn in unlooked for directions. Tennyson was a linguist, naturalist, geologist, astronomer, theologian, and skilled in the sciences. Nor did he neglect the lighter forms of literary study, for he was an assiduous novel-reader, like Macaulay, and could delight in the masterpieces of fiction whether English or French. But, like his great predecessor Wordsworth, he was above and beyond all the lover of nature, knowing by instinct the wonder and beauty of tree and star, and realising the miracle alike of the "flower in the crannied wall," which could be plucked and held ❝ root and all " in the hand, and of the vast evolutionary changes in the world's history. I believe it is a fact that nowhere among his multitude of allusions to nature in all her varying forms and emanations is there a single false statement. His word can always be accepted whether he simply name the colour of a leaf, the plumage of a bird, or the characteristic of a mountain. Apparently he delighted in minutiæ, but this was because

his knowledge was deep and founded on personal investigation. "The meanest flower that blows" had for him a charm, a significance, a wonder all its own. Scores of poems contain lines which in a perfectly casual manner convey striking scientific facts. Tennyson was so full of information that he was quite unpretentious in his use of it; and he has cast into the most attractive poetic shape many a hard dry truth. Nothing, perhaps, could be more wonderfully expressed than that somewhat curious discovery that water, when exposed to cold more than enough to freeze it, may still retain liquidity if kept still, while the slightest motion will set the particles in motion, and, by helping their molecular change of position, instantly cause the water to solidify. What I have tried to explain in this involved sentence Tennyson has condensed into the magic lines

Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears
That grief hath shaken into frost,

"Shaken into frost" is worthy to be accepted as a chemical formula.

"Yes, Tennyson is a great student of Nature," wrote William Cullen Bryant. But Charles Kingsley had discovered the fact before, and in his now famous essay had written

"This deep simple faith in divineness of Nature as she appears, which, in our eyes, is Mr Tennyson's differentia, is really the natural accompaniment of a quality at first sight its very opposite, and for which he is often blamed by a prosaic world; namely, his subjective and transcendental mysticism. It is the mystic, after all, who will describe Nature most simply, because he sees most in her; because he is most ready to believe that she will reveal to others the same message which she has revealed to him. Men like Behmen, Novalis, and Fourier, who can soar into the inner cloud-world of man's spirit, even though they lose their way there, dazzled by excess of wondermen who, like Wordsworth, can give utterance to each subtle anthropologic wisdom as the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, will for that very reason most humbly and patiently 'consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.' And even so it is just because Mr Tennyson

is, far more than Wordsworth, mystical, and what our ignorant and money-getting generation, idolatrous of mere sensuous activity, calls 'dreamy,' that he has become the greatest naturalistic poet which England has seen for several centuries. The same faculty which enabled him to draw such subtle subjective pictures of womanhood as Adeline, Isabel, and Eleanor, enabled him to see, and therefore simply to describe, in one of the most distinctive and successful of his earlier poems, how

The creeping mosses and clambering weeds,

And the willow-branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng

The desolate creeks and pools among,

Were flooded over with eddying song.

The same faith in Nature, the same instinctive correctness in melody, springing from that correct insight into Nature, ran through the poems inspired by medieval legends. The very spirit of the old ballad writers, with their combinations of mysticism and objectivity, their freedom from any self-conscious attempt at reflective epithets or figures, runs through them all.”

Hain Friswell, on the other hand, in his captious criticism, affected to scorn this fidelity to Nature, just as in the days gone by the Quarterly reviewer had ridiculed the gummy " chestnut-trees and the "four-handed" mole. "It is enough for Mr Tennyson's truly English spirit," said the cynic, "to see how

or how

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the field the road runs by
To many-tower'd Camelot ;

In the stormy east wind straining,

The pale yellow woods were waning,

The broad stream in his banks complaining,

Heavily the low sky raining

Over tower'd Camelot.

Give him but such scenery as that which he can see in

every parish in England, and he will find it a fit scene for an ideal myth, subtler than a casuist's questionings, deep as the deepest heart of woman." But it may fairly be asked whether the very capacity complained of was not a merit, and in itself demonstrated the highest quality which goes to the making of a true poet. Had not Tennyson been a keen observer and deeply versed in nature-lore, he could never have written Amphion and talked with such ease of the "gouty oak," the "pirouetting ashes," the "stiff-set sprigs," and the "scirrhous roots and tendons." Never could he have related the grotesque effect of Amphion's fiddling, when

The birch-tree swang her fragrant hair,

The bramble cast her berry,

The gin within the juniper

Began to make him merry,

The poplars in long order due,

With cypress promenaded,

The shock-head willows two and two

By rivers gallopaded.

Came wet-shot alder from the wave,

Came yews, a dismal coterie ;

Each pluck'd his one foot from the grave,
Poussetting with a sloe-tree:

Old elms came breaking from the vine,
The vine stream'd out to follow,

And, sweating rosin, plump'd the pine

From many a cloudy hollow.

Take every adjective in turn, and you find the distinctive characteristic of the tree; take every verb, and you find the only possible act of the timber fiddled into motion! No dull reader of

was giving us his facts and fancies in this poem. No lover