"But these are the days of advance, the works of the men of mind, When who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman's ware or his word? a kind viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword. "Sooner or later I too may passively take the print Of the golden age-why not? I have neither hope nor trust; May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint, Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust. "Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by, When the poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each sex, like swine; When only the ledger lives, and when only not all Shakespeare of Monologue, that while in Shakspeare the better, nobler and more beautiful parts of human nature stand forth in their full proportions and predominate over the evil, Browning is almost exclusively great in morbid anatomy, and the interest of Is it peace or war? civil war, as I think, and that of almost all his most celebrated pieces is due either to the actual presence or to the brooding shadow of The some horrible crime. They will see in the astounding passage, as it is to us, in which Mr. Forman finally falls on his knees before Walt Whitman, the Nemesis of an over-refined and artificial school. That which, to the simple lovers of Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Shelley appears merely rampant bestiality, and so far from being poetry that it is not even verse, may very likely to brains racked with Sordello be welcome as a refreshing "return to nature." To Tennyson, as the central divinity of the "Pantheon," Mr. Forman, of course, uplifts a censer smoking with the choicest incense. He permits us, however, to see that there are degrees in the merits of Tennyson's productions; he even utters the sad word "decadence;" he does not place Enoch Arden and the Idylls of the King by the side of In Memoriam, nor does he shrink from treating with open ridicule the attempt made by Tennyson's fanatical worshippers, not without the countenance it would seem of the poet himself, to represent the Idylls as 66 a great connected poem, dealing with the very highest interests of man." He is probably Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampright in suspecting that this theory and the efforts to give it support by rearrangement and patching arise from a desire to secure the kingship against division with other poets, who have recently produced, with success, poems on a large scale. There is one passage of Tennyson however of which Mr. Forman is particularly enamoured, but with regard to which we venture very respectfully to dissent from him, and will state our reasons for doing so, because, perhaps, it is our best way of indicating in what sense, if at all, we should desire to qualify his and other people's praises of Tennyson and the Tennysonian school. We will only premise, in case any of our remarks happen to have caught the reader's eye before that they are reproduced, not borrowed. The passage to which we refer is the invective against the love of Peace, written at the opening of the Crimean war, and intended to stimulate the war passions of the nation, as it probably did : "Why do they prate of the blessings of peace? We have made them a curse, Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own; And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearthstone? Peace in her vineyard-yes-but a company forges men lie; the wine. "And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head, led wife, While chalk, and alum, and plaster are sold to the poor for bread, And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life. "And sleep must lie down arm'd for the villainous centre-bits Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights, While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as he sits To pestle a poison'd poison behind his crimson lights. "When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee, And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones, Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea, War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones. "For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill, And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the threedecker out of the foam, That the smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter and till And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yardwand, home "What! am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood? "War with a thousand battles and shaking a thousand thrones" to cure the hysterical mock disease of one man! What is this but the extreme expression of unmanly, helpless, thoroughly ignoble egotism? Why cannot this hero who has compromised a woman's character by his rather selfish imprudence, and killed her brother in a foolish duel, regain such Must I, too, creep to the hollow and dash myself peace of mind as is possible under the circumstances, down and die, in some better way than by shedding more blood and Rather than hold by the law that I made, never bringing more misery on the world? Because he more to brood On a horror of shattered limbs and a wretched swindler's lie?" To Mr. Forman, and to many other people these lines seem full of the noblest wisdom, and the only reason which they can conceive for anyone's being of a different opinion is, that his ignoble nature is stung by a just rebuke. It was Let it be at once heartily conceded that, in a world❘ where right is still to be upheld against powers of wrong of all sorts and sizes, from the Czar Nicholas down to Mr. Caleb Cushing, the Peace-at-anyprice doctrine is foolishness. Let it be conceded that there are still two good reasons at least for going to war, self-defence and the defence of public right, which is self-defence with the cause of humanity and honour superadded. Still, even in the case of the Crimean war, it seems to us possible that not only the commercial meanness, but a part at least of the real manhood of the nation may have been with Lord Aberdeen, a high-minded gentleman, and a devoted servant of his country if ever there was one, in struggling to avoid the terrible responsibility of breaking the happy spell of the forty years peace and letting loose again upon Christendom the hounds of war. The commercial meanness of the nation was in fact, to a great extent on the other side. putting itself into a swaggering attitude, and resolving to show the world that we were not a nation of shopkeepers. Many good and brave men deemed war righteous and inevitable; but at the same time all the poltroons were declaiming against the pusilanimity of statesmen who feared less to encounter obloquy than to shed the people's blood. Unluckily, with standing armies, though we talk about going to war, we do not really go to war, but send others to war in our place; and men who would creep under their beds if they thought that a bullet was coming within half a mile of them are at liberty, without being physically responsible, to hurl about their thunderbolts and to talk lightly of the heart of the citizen hissing on his own hearthstone. That phrase seems to us something more than Tyrtean: Tyrtæus, who had no doubt seen war, would probably have shrunk from using it. has no power of self-control or self-exertion, so that to cure him of his mental malady he must have a grand sensation at whatever cost to his fellow-creatures. Poor Alexander Smith in the same way wanted, as a cure for his dyspepsia, to head a charge of twenty thousand horse. Probably he would not have known on which side to mount his own charger. Of course we do not mean to name Alexander Smith in the same breath with Tennyson, but Alexander Smith was one of the Tennyson-unculi. The other ground for wanting a bloody war is to cure the nation of its Mammonism. But the excitement of the violent passions unfortunately does not extirpate the mean passions. It scarcely suspends their action. The swindlers, the impostors, the adulterators of food did not change their ways when we sat down before Sebastopol, It was about that time, if we remember rightly, that the great Paul and Strachan frauds occurred. Burglary, drunkenness, and wife-beating were as rife as ever, and, to the usual rogueries, were added those of commissaries and contractors. As to Stockjobbing, which drove the father of the hero in Maud to suicide, and the hero himself to misanthropy, war is the element in which it thrives. The hearts of the Bulls did not beat with the same desire as those of the Bears, nor did the heart of the Opposition in Parliament beat with the same desire as that of the Government unless it were the desire of the same places. For a moral malady a moral cure, in the case of the nation and in the case of the man. Let the nation reform itself, amend its laws, choose better rulers, rigorously apply the fraudulent Trustees Act, improve the medical police. Let the man heal himself of his heart-sickness by doing good to his kind. War may, and often does, elevate the soldier who faces death; it does not elevate, it deeply degrades those who with boastful language and furious gestures send the soldier to his doom. While peasants were agonizing on the blood-stained slope of Inkerman, or dying a lingering death in hospitals before Sebastopol, and perhaps owing their doom partly to the national spirit awakened by Tennyson's admirable lines, where was the poet of war and what was he doing? In his lines "To F. D. Maurice," which appeared with Maud, we see him sitting with his friend in a charming villa in the Isle of Wight, and chatting about the campaign over his | 66 they seem too evidently to be moved by an external action or effort of any kind painted with the self- return with him. Meantime we sit down in the twi light on the lake shore. In the speculative sphere, reign doubt and the luxury of doubt. If there is little genuine sympathy with the effort which results in action there is as little with the effort which results in conviction. That which is amiss in the world is left to unriddle itself bye-and-bye. Death, not reason, keeps the keys of all the creeds. At the end of The Vision of Sin, when we are brought face to face with the difficult question, God spares us the trouble of attempting to solve it by "making Himself an awful rose of dawn"-words almost ludicrously emblematic of that philosophic mood of pensive expectancy from which the philosophy of Tennyson's poems springs, and which his surpassing genius has probably done not a little to propagate among young men of intellect. Wordsworth's Happy Warrior has really far more of stimulus to action in it than the war passage in Maud, though the force is latent in perfect gentleness. Compare again Wordsworth's description of a perfect woman, merely in a moral point of view (for the lines though beautiful are defective in art) with the women of Tennyson's poems. Tennyson's women, with exquisite poetic grace, are fit denizens for moated granges, fit companions perhaps for a pensive twilight stroll, hardly fit denizens of a work-day home or fit companions for a working life. The type of them is Margaret, whose own sister is the "mystery of mysteries, faintly smiling Adeline." One cannot imagine these beings moving about a house. Isabel indeed is set before us as the perfect wife, but she is only a beautiful statue with the emblems of marriage at her side. She is truly symbolized by "the mellow reflex of a winter moon," as cold, as visionary, as motionless. The chief function of woman seems to be that of casting out the demon of hypocondria from the breast of the solitary and relieving him of the melancholy which flows to him from all things round him-from his home and history, from nature, from philosophy, from science. Women are the countercharms of space and hollow sky. Marriage itself though extolled as the gate of virtue and happiness in terms which would satisfy the most ardent preacher of matrimony, seems to lead not from listlessness to activity, but from a sad dream into a happy one. In The Miller's Daughter we see the visionary and his wife leading the life of lotus eaters. Even children would bore them. They have had one child which has died, and become a pensive reminiscence adding the luxury of melancholy to their happy thoughts, as they sit at evening looking into each other's eyes or wander out to see the sun set. We are not speaking of the general merits of Tennyson's poetry. If we were we should echo the well chosen words of Mr. Forman, not excepting the epithet, "first and greatest of writers in verbal mosaic." Nor, are we speaking of Tennyson as a man in any invidious sense. He has of course himself acted on the greatest scale and in the way assigned by nature to his genius in producing a glorious body of poetry. We are speaking only of a certain ethical tendency in his poems and of their possible effect, as regards ordinary words, in indisposing to strenuous action, and at the same time disposing to occasional violence of sentiment like that expressed in the passage, poetically admirable no doubt, but in our eyes ethically and politically less admirable, which gave occasion to Mr. Forman's remarks and to our comment upon them. RECOLLECTIONS OF PAST LIFE, By Sir Henry Holland, Bart., M.D., F.R.S., D.C.L., President of the Royal Institution of Great Britain: Physician in Ordinary to the Queen. NEW YORK: D. APPLETON & Co. Sir Henry Holland was bound to give us his "Recollections. He has had singular opportunities for making a note book. He is now eighty-three years old, entered the world with the French revolution, has attended six Prime Ministers, was on the field of Vittoria, and was sitting with Lincoln and Seward when news arrived of the battle of Chattanooga. Very early in life he got as a physician into good London practice, presenting almost a unique exception, so far as London doctors are concerned, to the rule that physicians begin to make their bread when they have no teeth left to eat it. His eminent social qualities, his urbanity of manner and the suavity of his temper, his union of general taste and cultivation with medical skill, gained for him at the same early age a permanent footing in the best, really the best, society. He had so firm a hold on the confidenee, and perhaps still more on the attachment of his patients, that he has been able through life to take an annual tour. He has thus been in a great many places. This is not of much importance, as all London, and all New York have now been in the same places. What is of more importance is that he has seen an immense number of eminent men and women, either professionally or socially; not a few of them round his own table at breakfast, than which he says "no meal is better fitted for social enjoyment, if not impaired by those hesterna vitia of the dinner table which so often sadden or unsettle the temper of the ensuing day"-or, we may add by having to go to your office afterwards. In these "Recollections" a perfect throng of notabilities pass over the scene; of the men and women of the last three hat His ed to him till midnight with unabated interest. come, will, perhaps, tell some truths about the whole and we believe true, "A clear and masculine understanding lightened by great kindness of temper and genial humour vested itself in language of almost rustic plainness. There was something of the abnormis sapiens about him in his power of reaching sound conclusions which often sounded like maxims, from the terse simplicity of their expression. Singularly handsome in the best English type he was wholly without personal vanity. He attained and retained the foremost place in political life without ambition and withont party animosity. Under the semblance of carelessness about men and things, and real carelessness as to what concerned himself personally, he was deeply conscientious in all that he deemed the interests of the country. Though he could joke about the making of Bishops, and complain in somewhat homely phrase (O courtly Sir Henry, what was the phrase?) of the trouble they gave him by dying, no subject, as I had frequent opportunity of knowing, If the occasioned him more earnest thought." quarters of a century hardly one is wanting except Napoleon I., whom few Englishmen had a chance of seeing. Most of them, it is true, do little more than pass over the scene. But sometimes we get more vividness and detail. Murat appears "tall and masculine in person; his features well formed, but expressing little beyond good nature and a rude energy, and consciousness of physical power; his black hair flowing in curls over his shoulders, his with plumes, his whole dress carrying gorgeous an air of masquerade, well picturing the ardent chief of cavalry in Napoleon's great campaigns." He was "resplendent on horseback" and dwarfed all his numerous suite in horsemanship as well as in person; yet Sir Henry saw him thrown from an English blood-mare, to his great disgust. Sir Henry once rode close to him at a review in a charge on a square of infantry, within which the Queen was placed, and noted his elation and eagerness even in that petty mimicry of fight. It is something to have been at the Court ball at Naples, when a vague rumour preluding a great event, ran through the room, and was followed by whisperings between the King and Queen, and then, the party having at once broken up, by the announcement that Napoleon had escaped from Elba. Of Madame de Stael, Sir Henry's opinion, delivered with all due urbanity and diffidence, is that "she would willingly have surrendered something of her intellectual fame for a little more of personal beauty." "She was ever curiously demonstrative of her arms, as the feature which best satisfied this aspiration. A slip of paper often in her hand and sedulously twisted during her eager conversation, might be a casual trick of habit, though there are some who give it a more malicious interpretation." Sir Henry retains strongly in memory the picture of a Spanish Bourbon group, the King, Charles IV., of Spain, his Queen, the Infante Don Paolo and Godoy-"the old king, bulky in body, vacant in face and mind, placidly indolent in his whole demeanour-the Queen, a woman whose countenance, voice and gesture might easily in older days, have condemned her as a witch. The Infante was an ill-fashioned youth, who laughed idiotically when his mother alluded to the wine-mark on his face, and Godoy (Prince of the Peace) the shadow of a handsome man; pleasing in manner and common conversation, but showing no other quality to justify the influence he so long retained in the government of Spain." Pretty free for a Court physician Talleyrand rises, witty but not ethereal. "Wholly absorbed in the physical pleasure of eating, he spoke little during dinner, and little in the early stages of digestion. This devotion to the single real meal of the day he did not seek to disguise. Later in the evening his eloquence, if such it might be called, broke out, and more than once I have listen- | it, or, as I may better say, in lessening that sense of "Gates Ajar" theory of our future life is true, it |