Consort, paid his first visit to the Queen. "There was a kind of stately innocence about her," he reports; and she told him that, next to the Bible, In Memoriam was her comfort. In 1863 he writes his official but hearty welcome to Alexandra, the new Princess of Wales. In the midst of all this visiting and correspondence with dukes and princesses and great ladies of the court, it is pleasant to read the letter in which Tennyson congratulates Swinburne on his Atalanta in Calydon; it is long, he says, since he has read anything so fine. The poem has both "strength and splendor," and shows, adds the elder poet, "a fine metrical invention which I envy you."

In 1864 appeared Enoch Arden. It was deservedly and immediately popular, and Sir Alfred Lyall says that it has been dramatized in London and New York, translated into Latin and into seven modern languages, seven distinct translations being made in France alone. In the same volume with Enoch Arden, of which sixty thousand copies were almost immediately sold, was a poem in dialect, then a rare experiment in English poetry, which must count among Tennyson's successes. In The Northern Farmer is heard the voice of that sturdy breed that Tennyson knew so well, combined with genuine pathos and humor.

Marked mainly by increase of fortune and fame, Tennyson's life moved on these pleasant lines for many years. Honors were showered upon him and visitors high and low sought him out, though his shyness and dislike of conspicuous positions was always asserting itself, as many an anecdote could testify. A pleasant glimpse of him is at Marlborough school, whither he had taken his older son Hallam, reading Guinevere to the Upper

Sixth after dinner. The Holy Grail was published in 1869, and he continued his Idylls of the King. In 1875 the public was surprised by a new phase of the poet's art in Queen Mary, the first of his dramas. More than this, he intended his plays to be acted, and whatever may be thought of his dramatic success, there is something admirable in the vigor with which a man of sixtyfive turned to labor in a new field. Queen Mary was played by Irving and his company, and Browning affirmed the first night to be a complete triumph. Harold and Becket soon followed. The latter, refused by Irving in 1879, was staged a dozen years later, and the actor in 1893 records the fiftieth performance in the "hey-day of success." In 1882, however, a very disagreeable incident had occurred. The Promise of May, a kind of village tragedy, was misunderstood by the public and very roughly handled. "In the middle of one of the performances Lord Queensberry rose, and in the name of Free Thought protested against Mr. Tennyson's abominable caricature."" Even more noteworthy than these dramatic ventures was the vigor of production which Tennyson showed in the ballads and occasional pieces of his old age. Some of his best known poems appeared in the volume dedicated to his grandson by one who had passed his threescore and ten. Here were the swing and noble sentiment of The Revenge, The Defence of Lucknow, The Voyage of Maeldune, and the spirited rendering of the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Brunanburh. Almost to the end this vigor of production asserted itself. Probably none of his shorter poems will be remembered longer than Crossing the Bar, which was written in his eighty-first year and came, as he said to his son, “in a moment;" it is rightly called the crown

of the poet's life-work. A few days before his death he requested that Crossing the Bar should be put at the end of all editions of his poems.

As early as 1868 he had begun to build his stately house at Aldworth in Surrey, and henceforth had two homes. He was wont to stay at Farringford until the early summer, and then went to Aldworth, where he got relief from his hay fever and enjoyed his country walks. If on these rambles, we are told, 66 a tourist were seen coming towards him, he would flee." Gladstone had proposed a baronetcy to him, but it was declined. In 1874 Disraeli again pressed this honor upon him, and Tennyson again declined it, but proposed that it should be kept in a kind of storage for his son. This, of course, was impossible. In the fall of 1883, however, Tennyson made a voyage with Gladstone on the Pembroke Castle as far as Norway, getting a particularly warm welcome at Copenhagen, where, in the small smoking-room of the steamer, the poet read his "Bugle Song" and The Grandmother to the crowned heads of Russia and Denmark and the Princess of Wales. During the whole journey Gladstone and Tennyson had infinite talk on poetry and philosophy. One day the former proposed to Hallam Tennyson that his father should accept a peerage; the matter was mentioned to Tennyson, and statesman and poet discussed it without result. The upshot may be given in Tennyson's own words: "By Gladstone's advice I have consented to take the peerage, but for my own part I shall regret my simple name all my life." In 1884 he took his seat in the House of Lords as Baron Tennyson.

Meanwhile he was paying the invariable penalties of old age. His friend FitzGerald had died in the preceding

year, and to the poet life seemed scarce worth living out,

"Remembering all the golden hours
Now silent, and so many dead,

And him the last."

In 1886 his second son, Lionel, died on the homewardvoyage from India, and was buried at sea. In 1888 he suffered a serious attack of illness, but recovered and was again working on a new volume of poems when he was shocked by the news of Browning's death, in December, 1889. In 1892 it was noted that for the first time Tennyson's voice failed while he was reading his Lotos-Eaters aloud. At the end of June he left Farringford for Aldworth, and for a while was able to take his regular walks, but soon he was confined to his garden, and rested in a summer-house sheltered from the wind. In July he visited London for the last time. Late in September his illness took its fatal turn. As the end approached he called repeatedly for his Shakespeare. Early on the morning of October the 6th he passed quietly away. Cymbeline, one of his favorite plays, was placed with him in his coffin; and on the 12th, with stately funeral ceremonies, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from his friend and generous rival, Robert Browning.

ROBERT BROWNING

VITALITY, versatility, intellectual curiosity

these

were the most obvious characteristics in Browning's life. "Since Chaucer was alive and hale," wrote Landor of him in 1846,

"No man has walked along our roads with step

So active, so enquiring eye, or tongue

So varied in discourse."

Yet in the external aspects of his life there was nothing sensational. Born in a quiet, conventional atmosphere, he lived and died conventional. In religion a dissenter, he was a conformist in little matters of daily life; he hated eccentricity. The same eager spirit, however, which in another age would have discovered Guiana or caught the fire of the French Revolution inspired him. By his energy and grasp of realities he outran most of his contemporaries in discovering and expressing the catholic, inquiring spirit of his time. His interest in the life about him was unflagging; all through his long experience he pursued untiringly his ideal, and to the end he bore his burden with an exuberant enthusiasm.

Browning's parents were Robert, Browning and Sarah Anne Wiedemann. Camberwell, where they lived, was then on the outskirts of London, and surrounded by fairly open country, and there, on May 7, 1812, their first child, Robert, was born. His father had succeeded the grandfather Browning in a respectable position in the Bank of England, but he had, unlike his practical, somewhat stern parent, gone unwillingly into banking,