great a power-being as it were a part of God and of the life of God in him-that only joy remains.

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

Every

prologue to the poem written in 1849. conclusion he had come to is confirmed and reexpressed 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."

THE

CHAPTER IX

"MAUD" AND THE WAR-POEMS.

"HE main point concerning Tennyson himself on 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 particular 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

fare 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, then by the death of the Duke of Wellington, and then by the Crimean war. Three short poems, written in 1852, and published in the newspapers, belong to the French menace: Britons, Guard your Own! The Third of

February! and Hands all round; God the tyrant's cause confound! They are sturdy, full-bodied things, and The Third of February maintained against our shameless alliance with the Man of December the moral censure of England on his murderous work:

What! have we fought for Freedom from our prime,
At last to dodge and palter with a public crime?

We are grateful to Tennyson for these words, though afterwards he seemed to be a partisan of the war in which the Third Napoleon became the comrade in arms of England. But we may pardon him for that, for it was his long hatred of Russia for her bloody work in Poland which was at the root of his approval of the Crimean war. This patriotism had soon a noble subject in the praise of the great Duke. Tennyson issued his Ode on the day of Wellington's burial, and republished it a year after with many notable changes. This is one of his finest poems. It was fitting that the foremost man in England, who had worn his honours with a quiet simplicity for so many years in the "fierce light" which shines on a world-wide fame, and in whom the light never found anything mean or fearful, should, after his death, receive this great and impassioned tribute. What he did in politics was always questionable. He was nothing of a statesman, as Tennyson calls him. He proved his inability when he was called to the Premiership. Then he was first arrogant, and afterwards perplexed by the mischief he wrought. Indeed, he was profoundly ignorant of England; but, when he found out his ignorance, he had the good sense