so that his poem has an arbitrary aspect such as we never meet with in those of the laureate. The close of the "Death of King Arthur," is most valuable as definitively pointing out his broad and vital system of interpretation, which fully justifies the deepest meanings being drawn from his later classical poems such even as at first sight might seem forced and capricious. Indeed, were it not that his poems are uniformly so staid and serious in spirit, it might be difficult to have the real interpretation in any sense received. The following lines are nobly expressive in the sense I have now been indicating:

In sleep, I seemed

To sail with Arthur under looming shores,
Point after point; till on to dawn, when dreams
Begin to feel the truth and stir of day,

To me, methought, who waited with a crowd,
There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore
King Arthur, like a modern gentleman
Of stateliest port; and all the people cried,
"Arthur is come again; he cannot die."
Then those that stood upon the hills behind
Repeated," Come again, and thrice as fair;"
And, further inland, voices echoed-" come,
With all good things, and war shall be no more."
At this a hundred bells began to peal,

That, with the sound, I woke, and heard indeed

The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas morn.

This is just Tennyson's way of saying that Arthur is the symbol of perfect gentlemanhood; and that so long as characters are refined by Christian influences,

and go softly through the commonest duties of life, dispensing blessing and comfort, Arthur will be with us "thrice as fair; and that if all men were embued with this spirit wars would cease upon the earth.

Of In Memoriam I would fain speak a little more fully. The main reason for introducing it at this point will afterwards appear. The preface to it beginning,

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Strong Son of God, Immortal Love," may be regarded as the centre-point of the poet's life-plan or scheme of the universe. Just as Dante's whole works have their root in a sonnet or two in the Vita Nuova, so these wonderful verses point to the tap-root experience of our poet, whence has sprung his ripened greatness. But that does not lie in the fact of his having been bereaved -of his having "loved and lost;" and his commemorating his loss in a lengthened poem. In neverto-be-forgotten words he rejects the comfort proffered in the fact of loss being common to the race, and indirectly hints at that which was to distinguish his from a common sorrow. This lay in the wealth of being it was to bring him, which could never be fully said or sung, but only lived and rejoiced in. It is because he conquered sorrow, and made it yield him, and that not for himself alone, such a harvest of higher life and nobler aims, that he would have been, though he had never written a line-a poet. Like Dante, Tennyson draws great spiritual gain from his personal loss, and his sorrow becomes a platform from which to reach

Dante's poem is

forward to loftier levels of life. infinitely more valuable to us for showing so clearly, albeit by symbols, his gradual but glorious ascent upward through such hard harsh opposing circumstances, than for all its old-world philosophy and middle-age learning. Tennyson's In Memoriam is great for the same reason. It will live, not because the poet "advanced into the rare sphere of metaphysics;" but because in it we clearly see philosophy transfigured by earnestness of life and aspirations after purity and holiness. From the philosophical side, doubtless, In Memoriam will get antiquated and uninteresting just as Dante's Divina Commedia has already to a large extent become; but the one as well as the other will be read for its beautiful revelations of human feeling, devout longings and spiritual attainment; and will be ever new as interpreted, in their higher issues, by earnest human lives. The intellectual modes of solving the enigmas of human destiny will change with each succeeding age as they have changed, but in all the changes men will delight to read through these glasses, more darkly or clearly, the struggles of heroic human hearts.

Having said this much my readers will be prepared for this next remark, that a proper appreciation of the spirit out of which In Memoriam sprang, and the issues to which it led, is essential to rightly understanding the later works of Tennyson. And yet it is astonishing the remarks one comes upon not only in drawing-rooms but

in review-articles, as to this poem. It is still frequently spoken of as the outcome of mere morbid feeling, in a mild whisper, of course; and then again it is vague, cloudy, and obscure, remarks made in a rather bolder key because they appear somewhat more critical. The first remark is so short-sighted as not to be worth notice, and the other is as absurd as the dictum of that critic who pronounced the White Doe of Rylstone the worst poem ever imprinted. For who ever heard of philosophers following their problems to the very verge of the Infinite and not being cloudy and obscure? Tennyson struggles with, or touches on the edge of, all these questions and In Memoriam partakes generally of the obscurity of the questions he has been dealing with; only this has to be said, that it is constantly relieved and lighted up, as no merely philosophical treatise ever yet was, by deep glances aside at life, religion or friendship. In Memoriam, in short, is a picture of the way in which a true soul at last obtains consolation for bereavement—a significant showing forth of the futility of all vain earthly philosophies after due trial has been made of these a proving, as only such things can be proved, that from each flower of human wisdom the true spirit, as it rises higher, yet reaps a blossom for its brow, as the bee extracts honey from very poison-flowers. We see, too, that as the spirit humbly forms these beautiful flowers into a shade to hide from itself the brightness of the glory it has ventured to approach, the

full clear light of heaven breaks through upon it, and as the flower opens its heart to the sun so the deepest human experience flows sweetly forth in music like this::

Forgive my grief for one removed,

Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.

And although the being mourned for is no imaginary creature no half-abstraction, like Milton's Lycidas, but a real bosom-friend and college-companion, we find that sorrow gives place to cheerful content, and doubt and discontent," ill brethren," yield to a calm determination to live nearer to "that friend who lives in God."

As being perhaps the most direct way of showing the wealth of life our poet has gained, let my readers only realize the meaning of the circumstance of a poet actually praying for forgiveness for writing such a poem. This is surely something new and unprecedented in the annals of poetry. One can scarcely conceive Coleridge, Keats, or Byron-all so proud of the sensuously-beautiful forms in which they clothed their conceptions— doing such a thing. Scarcely even can we think of Shakspeare or Milton establishing such a precedent. "Gentle Will," to be sure, was a puzzling fellow, and had surprising depths of humility and wisdom in him. Little as we know about him, we know this that he was a busy man, and made grand practical use of life. He wrote all these plays and poems, so full of observation