diverse for ever, each complements each; both united in diversity make the perfect humanity; their work must be together, in difference. These are the vital truths which Tennyson expresses in the famous lines of the Prince's speech, and they govern, or ought to govern, the whole question of the future position of womanhood in a better society than that in which we live. They do not govern the position or the life of womanhood at present. The prejudices both of men and women are against their full development. Nor do I think that Tennyson himself (save on a wind of prophecy) saw clearly to what conclusions his own views would lead. We could not expect he should, but men and women will in the end grasp with proper largeness of thought what this means:

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time
Sit side by side, full summ'd in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-reverent each and reverencing each,

Distinct in individualities,

But like each other ev'n as those who love.

These verses assert far more for women than that they should find their only perfect life in marriage and in home; their only exercise of sacrifice in motherhood, in nursing the sick, in tending on the poor, or their only career in personal devotion to those they love. Tennyson, sometimes seeing farther, comes back to circle. round these things of home alone; and most men and women, even now, think that these exhaust all the

womanly work of women.

It is not so. We have gained

a wider view. To be, indeed, a true wife, such as Tennyson has drawn on the lips of the Prince; or to be a sweet and noble mother, one

Not learned, save in gracious household ways,
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt

In angel instincts, breathing Paradise,
Interpreter between the gods and men,
Who look'd all native to her place, and yet
On tiptoe seem'd to touch upon a sphere
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved
And girdled her with music. Happy he,
With such a mother!

-to be these noble creatures at home, and to build up children into noble life-this, indeed, is the work of womanhood done not only at home, but for the State and for humanity at large. No higher work in the world exists than that of motherhood, forming children. into true and loving men and women.

But this does not cover all. In our complex and crowded society, there are thousands of women who have no home, who are not wives and mothers, but who are hungry to become themselves, to realise themselves in work, to live outside of themselves in the life and movement of the whole. These scarcely come into Tennyson's outlook at the end of The Princess. For these, the education in knowledge and the training of their powers to all kinds of work which Ida established in her college are necessary, but with a clear considera

tion of sexual difference. This work is, however, to be carried out on other principles than those which Ida laid down-in union with man, with as large a training in the just use of the emotions, in the just expansion of the imagination, in a true sight of the beautiful, and in the wise development of the ideal and the spiritual, as in the accurate knowledge of science and history, of law and literature. And then, the work of the world lies open to woman, to do in a different way from man, but with the same ends, and in the same cause-the cause of the happiness, the goodness, and the love of humanity.

When that is possible-when we shall have applied to all the problems of society the now and as yet unused elements which exist in womanhood-all results will be reached twice as quickly as they are now reached, all human work will be twice as quickly done. And then, perhaps, some new poet will write a new Princess.

CHAPTER VII

IN MEMORIAM

HE history of the writing of In Memoriam is well

ΤΗ

known. If an immortal fame can comfort Arthur

Hallam, who was so soon bereft of the brightness of the earth, then he is consoled in his high place for the loss of human life; for surely while the language of England lasts, so long will In Memoriam be read and Arthur Hallam be remembered. Thirty years ago, I made a pilgrimage to the little church near Clevedon, where the Hallams rest, and saw the graveyard, the yews, and the marble tablet glimmering in the church. It was then a lonely quiet place, in a furrow of the sandy slopes, not a house standing near it ; and fifty yards from it, but hidden from view, the broad estuary of the Severn filled with the tide. I heard the water wash the feet of the low cliffs as it passed by. Sorrow and death, peace that passeth understanding, the victory of the soul, seemed present with me; and the murmuring of the Severn became, as I dreamed, the music of eternal love, into whose vast harmonies all our discords are drawn at last.

I felt, it seemed, the impression of the place. I knew afterwards that it was the impression of the poem that I gave to the place. And this indeed is the lasting power of In Memoriam. It is a song of victory and life arising out of defeat and death; of peace which has forgotten doubt; of joy whose mother was sorrow but who has turned his mother's heart into delight. The conquest of love-the moral triumph of the soul over the worst blows of fate, over the outward forces of Nature, even over its own ill-that is the motive of the poems which endure, which, like the great lighthouses, stand and shine through the storms of time to save and lead into a haven of peace the navies of humanity. We are flooded to-day with poems of despair, with verse which boasts that it describes the real when it describes the base, which takes the vulture's pleasure in feeding on the corruption of society, and prophesies, when it lifts its dripping beak from the offal, that to this carcasscomplexion the whole of humanity will come at last. Tennyson himself has painted the class :

We are men of ruin'd blood,

Therefore comes it we are wise!

Virtue to be good and just

Every heart, when sifted well,

Is a clot of warmer dust,

Mixed with cunning sparks of hell.

The art and the temper that produce the poetry of despair and vileness will not last; and it is a comfort to think of this when we are greatly troubled with the