came the volume entitled Tiresias, stamped with that increasing preoccupation in religious subjects which marks his later work. Yet none of the poems in it which concern men's position in the universe, or that belief in the soul's imperishable nature which seemed to Tennyson the most vital of all faiths, are so likely to live as the eulogy of Virgil -perhaps his very finest technical achievement— which appeared in this volume. In 1886 came a

great sorrow, the death of his son Lionel, who succumbed to Indian fever while on his way homeward, and was buried in the Red Sea. His memory is enshrined in the volume issued in 1887 not only in the poem Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, but in the dedication to Lord Dufferin, a noble expression of the dignified grief that does not overpower gratitude. The title poem marks fitly enough all the change that had come in the poet's mental development; but while all the beliefs of youth, all the enthusiasm for progress, had faded into a deeper sense of man's petty station in the universe, and into a less confident historical survey which saw not only the flow but the inevitable ebb in all human effort, yet there was present a more assured conviction, a more nourished hope, that the single human existence was only a beginning or a stage, and in no sense a blank end. In 1888 came

the poet's first serious illness; yet he rallied, and in 1889 published still one more volume, containing the poem Crossing the Bar, which his son not unfitly calls "the crown of his life's work". In 1892 his play The Foresters was produced in America; that was among his latest interests. His final illness began early in September, though he had felt the end approaching long before. His great strength kept him living for a month, and death, when it came, was a slow ebbing of life. The actual circumstances of the scene are described with great

tenderness and beauty by his son in a passage that I do not care to mutilate by imperfect quotation. The final words of it may be borrowed:

"Some friends and the servants came to see him. He looked very grand and peaceful, with the deep furrows of thought almost smoothed away; and the old clergyman of Lurgashall stood by the bed with his hands raised and said, 'Lord Tennyson, God has taken you, who made you a prince of men! Farewell.'"1

That phrase accurately renders the impression made upon one by reading the Life. There is no doubt that a biography written, as are most modern biographies, from the point of view of a valet de chambre, might have insisted on Tennyson's irritable susceptibility to criticism and the frequent brusqueness of his manner to strangers, probably occasioned by sheer absence of mind. But unless nearly all the people who have led the movement of England in the last half-century were mistaken, the great artist was also one of the most lovable among men. I may quote for a final appreciation of him. this passage from a paper by Mr. Locker Lampson given in the Life, which gains a special value from the fact that the writer was delightfully alive to the humours of the poet's eccentricities. He was not afraid to laugh at Tennyson, but he was by his own confession still better disposed to laugh with him.

"Balzac's remark that 'Dans tout homme de génie il y a un enfant' may find its illustration in Tennyson. He is the only grown-up human being that I know of, who habitually thinks aloud. His humour is of the dryest, it is admirable. Did anybody ever make one laugh more heartily than Alfred Tennyson? He tells a story excellently, and has a catching laugh. There are people who laugh because they are shy or disconcerted,

1 Life, vol. ii. p. 429.

or for lack of ideas, or to bridge over some conversational gap or obstruction; only a few because they are happy or amused, or perhaps triumphant. Tennyson has an entirely natural and a very kindly laugh.

"I and mine have a very warm regard for Tennyson. He has been very kind to Mrs. Locker and me. The more we see of him, the more we appreciate his singular charm, which has never deserted him in this world, and which I trust will be secured to him in the next. His friendship has been, and still is, one of the solaces of my life."1

Chapter II.

Tennyson and Critical Opinion.

It has been shown that Tennyson's poetic faculty obtained prompt and enthusiastic recognition among a brilliant generation of Cambridge undergraduates. Beyond this circle, however, beyond the range which could be reached by the imposing qualities of his voice and presence, he only won his way slowly, and, after the fashion of genius, excited a good deal of hostility. Critics recognized in him a new thing, and to the average critic the new is always at first sight repellent. If we are to realize how Tennyson struck his contemporaries, we must form some conception of the literary standards of that time.

1830 Shelley, Keats, and Byron were dead; Wordsworth had long settled down into the mechanical dulness of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and while he retained a surprising share of veneration, produced nothing to stimulate enthusiasm. Coleridge was rhapsodizing at Highgate, the living sepulchre of a "poète mort jeune à qui l'homme survit". Moore was brilliant as ever, but the trickle of his genuine

1 Life, ii. p. 80.

though trivial inspiration had run dry; he was merely the successful man of letters, the quickwitted satirist, no longer the national singer. What the popular taste had sunk to in poetry may be inferred from Macaulay's onslaught in 1830, published in the Edinburgh Review, upon Robert Montgomery. Macaulay dealt widely in charges of puffery, but everybody who has written reviews knows very well that it is perfectly impossible to make the public read and buy anything that they do not honestly like. In default of a better they took Robert Montgomery to their hearts. How blank was the next decade, except for the advent of Tennyson, may be gathered by a study of the literary articles in the great Whig review, which represented probably the best and most temperate critical opinion of the day. In March, 1831, an article was devoted nominally to the poems of Mr. Edmund Reade,-which, to judge from the extracts given, would not obtain six lines of notice in any selfrespecting paper to-day,—but really to a consideration of the state of contemporary poetry, and from it I shall quote largely. The article began:

"Perhaps there has never been a time since the prosaic days of Whitehead and Hayley in which so little good poetry has been issued from the press, as during the last two years. That some meritorious poems have been published within this period we do not deny, but we think that even they who look with partially indulgent eyes on the efforts of contemporary poets, will scarcely venture to affirm that any poetical works have lately appeared which have made much impression on the public taste, or have the slightest prospect of permanent popularity."

This, be it remembered, was written nearly a year after the issue of Tennyson's first volume.

"Yet with the exception of one or two great names,

we still possess all those eminent writers who have made the first twenty years of this century as distinguished in the annals of our poetry as the days of Elizabeth and Anne. Scott, Moore, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Campbell, Crabbe, Milman, Rogers, Bowles, and others whom the recollection of our readers can easily supply, are still living amongst us, and in the full enjoyment of their poetical powers.

(It will be seen that Milman, Rogers, and Bowles are classed by implication with Wordsworth and Coleridge.)

"But they write no poetry; and, what is perhaps stranger,—we do not expect it. We are content, even when fresh from the re-perusal of their former poems, to receive from their hands only prose; and 'prose by a poet', instead of being an object of foolish and distrustful wonder, is now almost the one thing sought. Whence, we may ask, does this arise, at a time when the activity of the public press exceeds all that has been known in this or any other country-when education is more diffused-the thirst for information greater-and the means to satisfy it more abundant than perhaps at any former period of our literary history? Various causes may be assigned for this phenomenon. It may be said that an excess of poetry, and an abundance of that which was really excellent, has produced satiety and fastidiousness. The public taste has been cloyed with dainties, and over-excitement is succeeded by indifference. This may be true to some extent, but there are other causes which have no reference to our recent

abundance of poetical treasure. The spirit of the age is not eminently favourable to poetry. We say this not in disparagement either of the spirit of the present age or of poetry. Our observation is strictly compatible with praise of both. The circumstance we have noticed arises from the greater spread of knowledge and thirst for information, and from a more just appreciation of the powers of poetry and the relative place and importance