"That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy'd
Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete.'

'You that way and we this' is the last word in this matter of critics whose taste has been formed by Homer, Sophocles, Tennyson, and Virgil. Yet the Tennysonian may safely challenge the production from the writings of the competitors for the throne of modern poetry, of one sane and suggestive ethical or religious idea that cannot be found better expressed in Tennyson."

Tennyson died in 1892, at the age of eighty-three -the age of Goethe, and a few months more. The scene offered by the closing hour of his life will long remain engraved upon the memory. The midnight time, the full harvest moon streaming in over the Surrey hills and flooding the chamber with light, the august head, the features calm save for lips that murmured—what other words so fit?—

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages,”—

the faces of the mourners stricken with grief and awe as that great soul faded "into the unknown, nothing could have been more impressive; nothing could have added to the solemn pathos of the scene. It will be remembered that "The Silent Voices," set to music by Lady Tennyson, was sung at the funeral services in Westminster Abbey. Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, writing a sequence of sonnets upon

this impressive occasion, makes mention of the fact

in the following beautiful words:

"Sweet was the sweet wife's music, and consoling:
The past returned: I heard the master's talk,
That many a time in many a happy walk

I heard when through the whin of Aldworth strolling,
Or on the cliffs of Wight with billows rolling
Below the jaggy walls of gleaming chalk:
Again I saw him stay his giant-stalk
To watch the foamy-crested breakers shoaling.

"And when the music ceased and pictures fled
I walked as in a dream around the grave,
And looked adown and saw the flowers outspread,
And spirit-voices spake from aisle and nave:-
"To follow him be true, be pure, be brave:
Thou needest not his lyre,' the voices said.

"Beyond the sun, beyond the furthest star,

Shines still the land which poets still may win
Whose poems are their lives-whose souls within
Hold naught in dread save Art's high conscience-bar—
Who have for muse a maiden free from scar-
Who know how beauty dies at touch of sin—
Who love mankind, yet, having Gods for kin,
Breathe, in Life's wood, zephyrs from climes afar.

"Heedless of phantom Fame-heedless of all

Save pity and love to light the life of Man-
True poets work, winning a sunnier span
For Nature's martyr-Night's ancestral thrall:
True poets work, yet listen for the call

Bidding them join their country and their clan.'"

These sonnets might fitly close the present discussion of the great poet to whose memory I have brought

the tribute of what poor words were at my command. But I cannot resist the temptation to reproduce in addition the one other memorable tribute of song evoked from an English poet by the passing of Alfred Tennyson. The words that follow are taken from "Lacrymæ Musarum," Mr. William Watson's noble threnody, and are worthy of their lofty theme.

"In far retreats of elemental mind

Obscurely comes and goes

The imperative breath of song, that as the wind
Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows.
Demand of lilies wherefore they are white,
Extort her crimson secret from the rose,
But ask not of the Muse that she disclose
The meaning of the riddle of her might:
Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite,
Save the enigma of herself, she knows.
The master could not tell, with all his lore,
Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped:
Ev'n as the linnet sings, so I, he said;—
Ah, rather as the imperial nightingale,
That held in trance the ancient Attic shore,
And charms the ages with the notes that o'er
All woodland chants immortally prevail!
And now, from our vain plaudits greatly fled,
He with diviner silence dwells instead,
And on no earthly sea with transient roar,
Unto no earthly airs, he trims his sail,
But far beyond our vision and our hail
Is heard forever and is seen no more."

Matthew Arnold

MAN is a creature of many moods, and it is the function of poetry to remain unresponsive to no one of them. It would seem as though Browning and Tennyson had ranged over the whole diversified field of modern emotion and modern thought, analysed all the complex processes of the modern soul, and left nothing for other poets to interpret. Yet there has been room in our own time for other poets, despite the comprehensive vision of these two, and of those others, there is, perhaps, none whom we would spare more reluctantly than Matthew Arnold. Especially to those who cannot share the robust temperamental optimism of Browning, and whose faith in the divine order of the world, in the assured future both of individual man and collective mankind, has not, like that of Tennyson, triumphantly survived the shock of doubt, the poetry of Arnold comes as one of the most precious of gifts. For such readers, it seems to afford an even more exact and intimate reflection of their deepest experience than the imaginings of either Tennyson or Browning. It seems less specious and rhetorical; more direct and sincere. I have spoken of the sharp contrasts which Tennyson was fond of drawing between the philosophies

of doubt and of faith. There is something almost theatrical in his method of portraying the agonies of the soul plunged in "the sunless gulfs of doubt," and his appeal for the acceptance of the fundamental articles of the Christian faith is made rather to the heart than to the reason. It comes near to defeating itself by its vehement intensity of emotion. It seems unwilling to admit the possibility of a secure resting-place for the soul outside the citadel of historical Christianity, and the life unfortified by these entrenchments seems a mockery of every noble aspiration. The essentials of Christian belief must be true,

"Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is."

But the pressure of our modern age, the widening of our modern thought with the process of the suns, has produced a type of mind which is forced to reject, sorrowfully but firmly, much of the religious teaching of the past, to readjust to new conditions the old beliefs, to find new sanctions for the conduct of the upright life. This spiritual temper, unwilling to blink what it conceives to be falsehood, yet resolute to uphold the dignity of man's moral nature when the props of dogma-when what builders call the "false work" of the structure-have been removed, may be illustrated by a passage in which Mr. Morley, speaking of the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau, contrasts the "infinite unseen which is in truth beyond