far indeed I am from asserting that books, as well as nature, are not, and ought not to be, suggestive to the poet. I am sure that I myself and many others find a peculiar charm in those passages of such great masters as Virgil or Milton, where they adopt the creation of a bygone poet, and reclothe it, more or less, according to their own fancy. But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing up amongst us, editors of booklets, bookworms, index hunters, or men of great memories and no imagination—who impute themselves to the poet, and so believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is for ever poking his nose between the pages of some old volume in order to see what he can appropriate. 'Ring the bells' without finding that we have taken it from Sir P. Sidney, or even to use such a simple expression as the ocean 'roars' without finding out the precise verse in Homer or Horace from which we have plagiarized it (Fact!) I have known an old fishwife, who had lost two sons at sea, clench her fist at the advancing tide on a stormy day, and cry out, 'Ay, roar; do! How I hate to see thee show thy white teeth!' Now,

They will not allow one to say

if I had adopted her exclamation, and put it in the mouth of some old woman in one of my poems, I dare say the critic would have thought it original enough, but would most likely have advised me to go to Nature for my old woman, and not to my imagination; and, indeed, it is a strong figure. Here is another little anecdote about suggestion. When I was about twenty or twenty-one I went on a tour to the Pyrenees. Lying among these mountains, before the waterfall that comes down a thousand or twelve hundred feet, I sketched it (according to my custom then) in these words

"Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn.'

When I printed this, a critic informed me that 'lawn' was the material used in theatres to imitate a waterfall, and graciously added, 'Mr. Tennyson should not go to the boards of a theatre, but to Nature herself, for his suggestions.' And I had gone to Nature herself. I think it a moot point whether, if I had known how that effect was produced on the stage, I should have ventured to publish the line."

And here we must leave off. Lord Tennyson, in his seventy-fifth year, is happily still a hale man, with his noble intellect unimpaired. That he will ever again produce anything equal to the meridian splendour of "In Memoriam" and the "Idylls," it would be hopeless to expect. But he may well rest content with the assurance that what he has done will live in literature. In his ripe old age he has the love and admiration of millions of the English-speaking race, to whom his works are a perennial source of consolation and delight. Let us take leave of him with a final glimpse of that placid home-life of which Mrs. Ritchie has given us so many delicate memorials:-"Sometimes at Aldworth, when the summer days are at their brightest, and high Blackdown top has been warmed and sunned, I have seen a little procession coming along the terrace walk, and proceeding by its green boundary into a garden, where the sun shines its hottest upon a sheltered lawn, and where standard rosetrees burn their flames. Mr. Tennyson in his broad hat goes first, dragging the garden-chair in which Mrs. Tennyson lies; perhaps one son

is pushing from behind, while another follows with rugs and cushions for the rest of the party. If the little grandsons and their young mother are there, the family group is complete. One special day I remember when we all sat for an hour round about the homely chair and its gentle occupant. It seemed not unlike a realization of some Italian picture that I had somewhere seen, the tranquil eyes, the peaceful heights, the glorious summer day, some sense of lasting calm-of beauty beyond the present hour."

May we not echo for the sweetest singer of our time, the wish expressed in his own beautiful lines?—

"As the rapid of life

Shoots to the fall-take this and pray that he
Who wrote it,

May trust himself; and after praise and scorn,
As one who feels the immeasurable world,
Attain the wise indifference of the wise;
And after Autumn past—if left to pass
His autumn into seeming-leafless days—
Draw toward the long frost and longest night
Wearing his wisdom lightly, like the fruit

Which in our winter woodland looks a flower"