period of poetry in which we live at present and are fully wearied with its fantasies of Nature and passion and words, that the poet who will recreate our song will take up again the common love and life of men. He will drink of the wayside fountains of humanity.

It was thus now with Tennyson. He began this vein with The May Queen, to which the galloping verse has sometimes given an air of sentimentalism. The same things would have made a different impression had the verse been shorter in line, and a little statelier in form. But it is sweet and gracious enough, and the mother, the poor pretty child and Robin her lover are our friends. He began it also with The Miller's Daughter, a simple story of true sweethearting and married love; but raised by the loveliness of the scenery which is inwoven with charm and grace into the tale, and by the simplicity of the expression, into a steady and grave emotion, worthy of a love built to last for life betwixt a man and woman. This was the sort of love for which Tennyson cared, for which Byron and Shelley did not care, which was not in the world where Keats lived at all-but which was in Wordsworth's world, and which, after all our excursions into phases of passion, is not only the deepest and highest of the affections, but the father and mother of all the other loves of earth. It was first in Tennyson's mind, but it had many companions. Love of many kinds, joy and sorrow of many kinds, as they were felt by the common human heart, not only by the great, but by the lowly upon earth, were now his interest, and many and

lovely were the poems he dedicated to them. Who is likely to forget Dora, The Gardener's Daughter, Sea Dreams, The Brook, Enoch Arden, and a host of others? This is the democratic element in Tennyson. It is, in all its phases, the democracy of the artist.

CHAPTER III

THE POEMS OF 1842

DO not think that since the time of Shakspere there have been in England any poets so close to the life of their own time as Tennyson and Browning; no, not even Wordsworth. Other men, like Pope, have got as close, or even closer, to distinct phases of thought or classes of society, but Tennyson and Browning settled themselves down to paint as far as they could all classes and their interests. They did this in different ways, but they both had a more universal aim than their predecessors, and covered a much larger and more various extent of ground. Of course they had more opportunities, more means. The steam-road, with its rapid travelling, extended literature to the country and brought the country into contact with the towns. The poet in London or the poet in the Isle of Wight touched a great number of different types of men which would have remained unknown to him fifty years before. In the same way the manifold forms of natural scenery in England or abroad were much more easily brought to

his knowledge. Moreover Tennyson and Browning. were lucky in their time. Their present was full of aspiration, of ideals, of questioning, of excitement. They were like ships floating into a great sea-loch, on a brimming tide and with a favouring wind.

Tennyson's interest in the humanity of his own day now grew continuously. I shall show in the next chapter how he could not help modernising the Greek and the romantic subjects of which he treated. Keats went away to Athens or Florence, and living in an alien age forgot his own time. Tennyson said to Ulysses or Arthur, "Come down from the ancient days, and live with me, here in England." And they came; and did their best to wear the modern dress. When we turn from these Greek subjects, we find him altogether English and modern. A series of poems entered into various phases of youthful love. The Gardener's Daughter painted with beauty and simplicity the upspringing of the fountain of love in a young artist's soul, and carried it on to marriage. And the love was set in a framework of soft and flower-haunted English scenery, every touch of which, in Tennyson's way, was woven into the feelings of the two young hearts. Moreover, though I think that the collecting of the story round two pictures is awkward, it enables Tennyson to throw over this tale of first love the glamour and tenderness of memory. The man who tells it has lost the wife of his youth, whose picture he shows to his friend. The loveliness of unselfish sorrow, which makes remembrance joyful in

regret, veils the story with the delicate vapour of spiritual love. At first reading, there is a want of closeness, of reality in the feeling described. But when we know that it is a mature man recalling what has been when she whom he loved of old has long since been in the heavenly life, we understand how the clear edges of passion melt into ideal mist; and then we read the poem from the poet's point of view.

The Talking Oak is another poem of youthful love. The lover to whom the tree speaks of his maiden and who tells the tree of her, is a motive which has been often used, but never with greater skill and charm. There is a youthful animation, and a happy chivalry in rivalry of praise between the lover and the tree, which are full of natural grace, that quality somewhat rare in Tennyson, who was frequently too academic, too careful in his work to attain it. In this poem, also, his inweaving of Nature's heart with the heart of man is more than plain. The oak talks to the lover. Nay, the oak itself is in love with the maiden. His very sap is stirred by her kiss. He drops an acorn on her breast; and the half-jealous lover knows that he need not be jealous. Above all, there is no poem more English in all the poems of Tennyson. We see the park, the Chase that Englishmen of all ranks love so well; the roofs of the great house above the trees; the wild woodland deep in fern, the deer, the mighty trees, the oak which has watched so many English generations, so much of English history-bluff Harry who turned the monks adrift