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In the last verse there is also a fine glimpse of truth. Often has the writer seen old people of both sexes in Scotch farmhouses attract the servants away from their work by gossip about old things-maundering recollections; and then on a moment's interval take occasion to "flite or scold at the waste of time. And

so our farmer :

What atta stannin' theer for, an' doesn bring ma the yaäle,
Doctor's a 'tottler, lass, an a's hallus i' the owd taäle;
I weänt break rules for Doctor, a knaws naw moor nor a floy;
Git ma my yaäle I tell tha, an' gin I mun doy I mun doy.

He is a strange mixture of rudeness, sincerity, sensitiveness, honesty, belief, disbelief, and a hundred other contradictory things. But he is true to what he professes-faithful to what he does see of the truth. The picture is not without its meaning for us who are so taken up with empty fancies, theories and ideas. Assuredly we may learn a lesson from one who so excludes all such, and like a blunt Saxon man holds intently to his daily work, feeling and firmly believing that the doing of that well is the fulfilling of a great duty.

There is just one other short remark I desire to make before closing. It is with regard to the pure Saxon words which Tennyson invariably uses in preference to other and more modern words. It has been well said that "if the Anglo-Saxon genius vanished under the influence of the Conquest, it was as a river which sinks into and runs under the soil, and which will issue forth

again after the lapse of hundreds of years." Tennyson is a real Saxon man, yearning for the practical, the concrete, but by necessity in contact with conflicting moods, because born in a time of hurry and speculation. But though he paints all these moods faithfully he yet points his reader uniformly beyond them, and hence as I have shown the ends of his poems are naturally enough the most significant and precious. This Tennyson is indeed a near relative of our earliest singersa star that in later times has burst forth beside our constellation of "early morning-stars of song" and of kindred with them. Though he bears with him all the thought, and enters, in a most manly spirit, into all the complicated culture and varied, confused, contradictory moods of the present, yet his instruments are of the simplest, identical with those our old, old fathers wrought with. The richness, the wealth, the many-colouredness of modern culture may give a complexness and by consequence an occasional obscurity to his mood; but his words in themselves are never obscure rather clear and simple, like the eye of some gentle girl in whose azure depths great thoughts and feelings lie hidden, yet open and confessed. Several illustrations of this suggest themselves to me. A little poem titled The Sailor Boy will serve my object here as well as any. Its purpose is to show how in the voyage of life after even the grosser temptations have been vanquished, the affections of race and family-so good in themselves—

may yet come in distracting the mind in its dutiful work. But here as will be noticed the spirit of the youth is victorious over all forms of temptation. Reading this little lyric one cannot help picturing those strange early adventurers, to whom we owe so much, on their rude skiffs or rafts turning a last long look back at the homes and the tender ones they are leaving behind; and then dashing aside the thought and urging on their craft the more powerfully that new far-outstretching worlds awaited them in the distance. The painting in this little poem is wonderfully fresh and clear-a soft morning effect runs through it one might say-the words are of the simplest Saxon and the meaning of the very fullest and deepest:

He rose at dawn, and, fired with hope,

Shot o'er the seething harbour-bar,

And reached the ship and caught the rope,
And whistled to the morning star.

And while on deck he whistled loud,
He heard a fierce mermaiden cry,
"Boy, though thou art young and proud,
I see the place where thou wilt lie.

"The sands and yeasty surges mix

In caves about the dreary bay,

And on thy ribs the limpet sticks,

And in thy heart the scrawl shall play!"

"Fool," he answered, "death is sure

To those that stay and those that roam;

But I will never more endure

To sit with empty hands at home.

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My mother clings about my neck,

My sisters clamour, Stay, for shame!'

My father raves of death and wreck,

They are all to blame--they are all to blame.

"God help me! save I take my part

Of danger on the roaring sea,

A devil rises in my heart

Far worse than any death to me."

And so with this little spirited Saxon song we take leave of the subject for the present, expressing our satisfaction that our poet is still simply Alfred Tennyson

-a name embalmed and cherished, not only for what it symbolizes of thought and great work done for England, Englishmen and the world; but also because it tells of what has been wisely repented of, put under foot, or better still departed from and left wholly undone. For now-a-days as in the long ago the greatest teaching is that which is sacred and unconscious, which is deep and inexpressible in words, and because Tennyson has taught us silently so much I have placed him thus in close juxtaposition with the giant-Thomas Carlyle.

JOHN RUSKIN,

ART CRITIC AND MORALIST.

Or all the distinguished writers of the present day, there is none who seems, at first sight, so diffuse and digressive as Ruskin. To the ordinary reader, his books are a sort of surprise and medley, from which he turns. with a vague pleasure-it may be with the consciousness of moral feeling strengthened and confirmed, but without that full satisfaction and sense of benefit which might be felt after the study of a far less powerful writer. But the reason, after all, is obvious enough to those who have made closer acquaintance with Ruskin. He carries along with him many elements and tendencies which would need to be separated and seen apart before the great majority could form anything like a correct estimate of his character and ways of thought. Sometimes simple and clear as a child, he beguiles us by his unaffected and artless love of nature, discovering many beauties in what we had before passed over as trivial and commonplace; then again he is so subtle, far

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