selves labouring on, and our labour useful and lovely when it is for others; and, lastly, I see the great labour of God's love underlying all and moving to a perfect close."

And all, as in some piece of art,

Is toil co-operant to an end.

And the conclusion that sums the whole is a solemn prayer to God that all the world may conquer, as he has conquered, the besieging years, and the powers of

sorrow.

O living will, that shalt endure

When all that seems shall suffer shock,

Rise in the spiritual rock,

Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure,

That we may lift from out the dust

A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquer'd years
To one that with us works, and trust.

With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul.

Nine years after Arthur Hallam's death, Tennyson's sister was married, and he writes her marriage song as the epilogue to his poem. We see then what was his temper of mind in 1842. Had he gone back, had he lost the fruits of the victory he had won? Love is not less, he says, but more. It is solid-set like a statue; it

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is moulded into calm of soul, all passion spent, and he has himself grown into something greater than before; so that his songs of dead regret seem echoes out of weaker times." It is not that he loves his friend less, but that his friend is with him so closely, in so vivid a life and with so great a power-being as it were a part of God and of the life of God in him-that only joy remains.

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Even as he sits at the wedding-feast, he feels Arthur with them, wishing joy. And then, as before, he passes from the personal, from the peace of home and its shelter, to think of the greater world of man, of the nobler race which God is making out of ours. He retires when night falls, and looks out on the skies as the moon rises. "Touch with thy shade and splendour," he cries, the bridal doors; let a soul from their marriage draw from out the vast, and strike his being into bounds, and be a closer link betwixt us and the crowning race, the higher humanity to be, of which my friend (and he sweeps. back, enamoured of unity like a poet, to the first subject of In Memoriam) was a noble type-the race to the making of which God is moving forward the whole creation. Thus he ends with the universal, with the reiteration of the victory of man over pain in the eternity of the love of God:

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

Seven years then passed by, during which Tennyson still revised his poem, during which his spirit was continually kept close to the conclusions of faith and hope and love, and of love the greatest of these three, to which he had come in In Memoriam. How would he feel towards these when so long a term of years had come to an end? We have an answer to that question in the prologue to the poem written in 1849. Every conclusion he had come to is confirmed and re-expressed in that profound and religious psalm. All that he loved, hoped for, and believed, is there laid in the hands, held. in the grace, and enshrined in the spirit of Him who is "Immortal Love."

CHAPTER IX

"MAUD" AND THE WAR-POEMS

HE main point concerning Tennyson himself on

THE

which I dwelt in the last chapter was that he had

freed himself in that poem from the merely personal. He has passed in In Memoriam from the particu lar to the universal. Before he had finished that poem, the pain of the world of man had flowed into his soul. He had reached full manhood in his art. From this time forth then, from 1850, when Tennyson was just over forty years of age, a vaster emotion belongs to his poetry, the solemn swell of the passion of mankind; yet the poetry does not lose, when he desires it, its happy brightness. The idyll of The Brook, published along with Maud, is as gay as it is gentle. Then, too, though his poetry has thus more than before to do with the larger life of man, he can still see Nature with the keen sight and enjoyment of youth. Moreover, he can still "follow the Gleam," still breathe with ease the ideal air, though his experience has been sad, though maturer years have led him to keep closer in his work to the facts of real life.

His poetry has certainly lost some of the animation, opulence, unconsciousness in singing, which are qualities of youth-of which qualities, however, he seemed to have less than other poets, because graver qualities, unusual in youth, balanced them; but it has gained more character; it knows itself better; it has more of the wisdom of life in it-and yet it has not lost passion. Nay, that is more profound; there is a greater general intensity of feeling on subjects worthy of deep regard. Moreover, the same width and depth of feeling with which he wrote about religion in In Memoriam now extended itself over the movements of the world. He is in closer sympathy with the life of England at home and abroad. The stories of the joys and sorrows of men and women which he took as subjects in 1842 (Dora and the rest) are now continued, but the colours in which he paints them are fuller and deeper in hue, and they are also more various. He writes of the farmer, the sailor,

the city clerk, the parson and lawyer and squire. Enoch Arden, Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook, The Grandmother, The Northern Farmer, The Sailor

· Boy prove with what variety and power and charm he wrought at this vein, and he loved to work in it to the very end.

But it was not only English life at home which engaged him. He followed up that life abroad. Rumours of war and war itself, after 1850, stirred his heart. The patriotic spirit which he felt so strongly all his life was now awakened, first by the threatening aspect of France,