expression must run, and the works of a poet cannot be understood unless we understand the poet himself.

of Law

1. Conspicuous among the main currents of thought (1) His sense and feeling that flow through the body of his writings is his perception of the movement of Law throughout the worlds of sense and of spirit: he recognizes therein a settled scheme of great purposes underlying a universal order and gradually developing to completion.

conceptions

(a) Illustrations of this recognition of pervading Law shown in his may be found in his conception of Nature, and in his treat- (a) of Nature; ment of human action and of natural scenery. Nature, which to Shelley was a spirit of Love, and to Wordsworth a living and speaking presence of Thought, is to Tennyson a process of Law including both. Even in the midst of his mourning over the seeming waste involved in the early death of his friend, he can write in In Memoriam

I curse not nature, no, nor death;
For nothing is that errs from law.

In all the workings of Nature he traces the evolution of
the great designs 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.

In The Higher Pantheism, a similar thought is found

God is law, say the wise; O soul, and let us rejoice,

For if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet His voice.

dom;

(b) Allied to this faith that the universe is "roll'd round of Freeby one fixt law" is the poet's sympathy with disciplined

(c) of Love;

order in the various spheres of human action. In politics his ideal Freedom is "sober-suited"; it is such a Freedom as has been evolved by the gradual growth of English institutions, a Freedom which

slowly broadens down

From precedent to precedent.

He has small faith in sudden outbursts of revolutionary fervour; he thinks that the "red fool fury of the Seine," the "flashing heats" of the "frantic city," retard man's progress towards real liberty: they "but fire to blast the hopes of men." If liberty is to be a solid and lasting possession, it must be gained by patient years of working and waiting, not by "Raw Haste, half-sister of Delay." So also Tennyson's love for his own country is regulated and philosophic: he has given us a few patriotic martial songs that stir the living blood "like a trumpet call," as The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Revenge, but in the main his patriotism is founded on admiration for the great "storied past" of England: though in youth he triumphs in "the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be," yet neither in youth nor in age is he himself without some sympathy with a distrust of the new democratic forces which may end in "working their own doom :"

Step by step we gain'd a freedom known to Europe, known to all,

Step by step we rose to greatness-thro' the tonguesters we may fall.

(c) Again, in his conception of the passion of Love, and in his portraiture of Womanhood, the same spirit of reverence and self-control animates Tennyson's verse. Love,

in Tennyson, is a pure unselfish passion. Even the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere is described from a spiritual standpoint, in its evil effects rather than in its sensuous details. His highest ideal of love is found in the pure passion of wedded life: true love can exist only under the sanction of Duty and of reverence for womanhood and one's higher self; and such love is the source of man's loftiest ideas, and inspires his noblest deeds.

(d) Lastly, Tennyson's appreciation of Order is illus- (d) of Scenery. trated in his treatment of natural scenery. He gives us scenes of savage grandeur, as in

the monstrous ledges slope and spill

Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,

and others of still English landscapes, the "homes of ancient peace," with "plaited alleys" and "terracelawn," of "long, gray fields," "tracts of pasture sunny warm," and all the ordered quiet of rural life.

2. A second great element of Tennyson's character is its noble tone. This pervades every poem he has ever written. His verse is informed with the very spirit of Honour, of Duty, and of Reverence for all that is pure and true.

The

(2) His nobility of thought.

city of

3. Another main characteristic of Tennyson is sim- (3) His simpliplicity. The emotions that he appeals to are generally emotion. easy to understand and common to all. He avoids subtle analysis of character, and the painting of complex motives or of the wild excess of passion. moral laws which he so strongly upholds are those primary sanctions upon which average English society is founded. A certain Puritan simplicity and a scholarly restraint pervade the mass of his work.

II. Tennyson the Poet:

(1) as Representative of his Age;

It is on these foundations of Order, Nobility, and Simplicity that Tennyson's character is built.

II. Turning now to the matter or substance of his poems, we note, first, that the two chief factors of Tennyson's popularity are that he is a representative English poet, and that he is a consummate Artist.

In the great spheres of human thought-in religion, in morals, in social life-his poems reflect the complex tendencies of his age and his surroundings. Not, it may be, the most advanced ideas, not the latest speculation, not the transient contentions of the hour; but the broad results of culture and experience upon the poet's English contemporaries. The ground of Tennyson's claim to be considered a representative of his age is seen in the lines of thought pursued in some of those more important poems which deal with the great problems and paramount interests of his times. The poems cover a period of fifty years, and must be considered in the order of their publication. In Locksley Hall, published in 1842, the speaker, after giving vent to his own tale of passion and regret, becomes the mouthpiece of the young hopes and aspirations of the Liberalism of the early Victorian era, while in Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After, the doubts and distrust of the Conservatism of our own times find dramatic utterance. The Princess deals with a question of lasting interest to society, and one which has of late years risen into more conspicuous importance, the changing position and proper sphere of Woman. In The Palace. of Art the poet describes and condemns a spirit of æstheticism whose sole religion is the worship of Beauty and Knowledge for their own sakes, and which ignores human

responsibility and obligations to one's fellow-men: on the other hand, in St. Simeon Stylites, the poet equally condemns the evils of a self-centred religious asceticism which despises the active duties of daily life. The Vision of Sin is a picture of the perversion of nature and of the final despair which attend the pursuit of sensual pleasure. The Two Voices illustrates the introspective self-analysis with which the age discusses the fundamental problem of existence, finding all solutions vain except those dictated by the simplest voices of the conscience and the heart. The poet's great work, In Memoriam, is the history of a tender human soul confronted with the stern, relentless order of the Universe and the seeming waste and cruelty of Death. The poem traces the progress of sorrow from the Valley of Death, over-shadowed by the darkness of unspeakable loss, through the regions of philosophic doubt and meditation to the serene heights of resignation and hope, where Faith and Love can triumph over Death in the sure and certain hope of a life beyond, and over Doubt by the realization

That all, as in some piece of art,
Is toil cooperant to an end.

Maud is dated at the conclusion of that long period of peace which preceded the Crimean War, when the commercial prosperity of England had reached a height unknown before, and when "Britain's sole god" was the millionaire. The poem gives a dramatic rendering of the revolt of a cultured mind against the hypocrisy and corruptions of a society degraded by the worship of Mammon. The teaching of Tennyson's longest, and in