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for its fulfilment. . . . If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may be read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own works."

Two years later, that is, in 1832 (the volume, however, is antedated 1833), appeared Poems by Alfred Tennyson,' pp. 163. In it were contained 'The Lady of Shalott,' and the untitled poems, known by their first lines, 'You ask me why, tho' ill at ease,' 'Of old sat Freedom on the Heights,' and 'Love thou thy Land, with Love far brought.'

In 'The Lady of Shalott' is mystically shadowed forth the relation which poetic genius should sustain to the world for whose spiritual redemption it labors, and the fatal consequences of its being seduced by the world's temptations, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

The other poems, 'You ask me why,' 'Of old sat Freedom,' and 'Love thou thy land,' are important as exponents of what may be called the poet's institutional creed. A careful study of his subsequent poetry will show that in these early poems he accurately and distinctly revealed the attitude toward outside things which he has since maintained. He is a good deal of an institutional poet, and, as compared with Browning, a strongly institutional poet. Browning's supreme and all-absorbing interest is in individual souls. He cares but little, evidently, about institutions. At any rate, he gives them little or no place in his poetry. Tennyson is a very decided reactionary product of the revolutionary spirit which inspired some of his poetical predecessors of the previous generation. He has a horror of the revolutionary. To him, the French Revolution was "the blind hysterics of the Celt," ["In Memoriam,' cix.], and "the red fool-fury of the Seine" ['I. M.,' cxxvii.]. He attaches great importance to the outside arrange-ments of society for upholding and advancing the individual. He would "make Knowledge circle with the winds," but "her herald, Reverence," must

"fly

Before her to whatever sky

Bear seed of men and growth of minds."

He has a great regard for precedents, almost as precedents. He is emphatically the poet of law and order. All his sympathies are decidedly, but not narrowly, conservative. He is, in short, a choice product of nineteenth century English civilization; and his poetry may be said to be the most distinct expression of the refinements of English culture. refinements, rather than the ruder but more vital forms of English strength and power. All his ideals of institutions and the general machinery of life, are derived from England. She is

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"the land that freemen till,

That sober-suited Freedom chose,

The land where, girt with friends or foes,
A man may speak the thing he will;

A land of settled government,

A land of just and old renown,

Where Freedom broadens slowly down

From precedent to precedent:

Where faction seldom gathers head,

But by degrees to fullness wrought,

The strength of some diffusive thought

Hath time and space to work and spread."

But the anti-revolutionary and the institutional features of Tennyson's poetry are not those of the higher ground of his poetry. They are features which, though primarily due, it may be, to the poet's temperament, are indirectly due to the particular form of civilization in which he has lived, and moved, and had his culture, and which he reflects more than any of his poetical contemporaries. The most emphasized and most vitalized idea, the idea which glints forth everywhere in his poetry, which has the most important bearing on man's higher life, and which marks the height of the spiritual tide reached in his poetry, is, that the highest order

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of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which informs his poem of The Princess.' It is prominent in ' In Memoriam' and in 'The Idylls of the King.' In 'The Princess,' the Prince, speaking of the relations of the sexes, says:

"in the long years liker must they grow; The man be more of woman, she of man;

He gain in sweetness and in moral height,

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,

Like perfect music unto noble words;

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.

Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:

Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm:
Then springs the crowning race of humankind."

To state briefly the cardinal Tennysonian idea, man must realize a womanly manliness, and woman a manly womanliness.

Tennyson presents to us his ideal man in the 109th section of 'In Memoriam.' It is descriptive of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. All that is most characteristic of Tennyson, even his Englishness, is gathered up in this poem of six stanzas. It is interesting to meet with such a representative and comprehensive bit in a great poet.

"Heart-affluence in discursive talk

From household fountains never dry;
The critic clearness of an eye,

That saw through all the Muses' walk;

Seraphic intellect and force

To seize and throw the doubts of man;
Impassioned logic, which outran
The bearer in its fiery course;

High nature amorous of the good,
But touch'd with no ascetic gloom;
And passions pure in snowy bloom

Through all the years of April blood."

The first two verses of this stanza also characterize the King Arthur1 of the 'Idylls of the King.' In the next stanza we have the poet's institutional Englishness:

"A love of freedom rarely felt,

Of freedom in her regal seat

Of England; not the school-boy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt;

And manhood fused with female grace
In such a sort, the child would twine
A trustful hand, unask'd, in thine,
And find his comfort in thy face;

All these have been, and thee mine eyes
Have look'd on; if they look'd in vain,
My shame is greater who remain,
Nor let thy wisdom make me wise."

Tennyson's genius was early trained by the skeptical philosophy of the age. All his poetry shows this. The 'In Memoriam' may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth century scepticism. To this scepticism he has applied an "all-subtilizing intellect," and has translated it into the poetical "concrete," with a rare artistic skill, and more than this, has subjected it to the spiritual instincts and apperceptions of the feminine side of his nature and made it

1 See The Holy Grail,' the concluding thirty-two verses, beginning: "And spake I not too truly, O my Knights," and ending "ye have seen that ye have seen."

2 The idea of 'The Princess.'

vassal to a larger faith. But it is, after all, not the vital faith which Browning's poetry exhibits, a faith proceeding directly from the spiritual man. It is rather the faith expressed by Browning's Bishop Blougram :

“With me faith means perpetual unbelief

Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,

Who stands firm just because he feels it writhe."

And Tennyson, in picturing to us in the Idylls, the passage of the soul "from the great deep to the great deep," appears to have felt it necessary to the completion of that picture (or why did he do it?), that he should bring out that doubt at the last moment. The dying Arthur is made to say:

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(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) —
To the island-valley of Avilion;" etc.

Tennyson's poetry is, in fact, an expression of the highest sublimation of the scepticism which came out of the eighteenth century, which invoked the authority of the sensualistic philosophy of Locke, and has since been fostered by the science of the nineteenth; while Browning's poetry is a decided protest against, and a reactionary product of, that scepticism, that infidel philosophy (infidel as to the transcendental), and has closed with it and borne away the palm.

The key-note of his poetry is struck in Paracelsus,' published in 1835, in his twenty-third year, and, with the exception of 'Pauline' published in 1833, the earliest of his compositions: Paracelsus says (and he who knows Browning knows it to be substantially his own creed):

"Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things, whate'er you may believe:
There is an inmost centre in us all,

Where truth abides in fulness; and around

Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,

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