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our master, and the higher education of women." Mr. Andrew Lang thinks that the question of woman, her wrongs, her rights, her education, her capabilities, was not in the air in 1847. On the other hand, Katharine L. Bates, after enumerating writers from Plato to Mary Wollstonecraft who may have given Tennyson a hint from which he evolved his poem, asks, “What need of books, when the question was vocal, even to shrillness, in the English air?" One is inclined to believe Miss Bates is right, for the present colleges for women at Oxford and Cambridge are witnesses to the long discussion that preceded their establishment. Girton College, two miles out from the heart of Cambridge, was lodged in its present handsome building in 1873. Ideas about the higher education of women must have been agitating the English mind long before 1873, for the English mind is conservative.

What kind of a university has Tennyson constructed for the education of his women?

"What are its distinguishing features [asks Miss Bates]? Beauty of dress, manifest in those academic silks of daffodil and lilac, 'zoned with gold'; beauty of abode, a palace of sculptured arches, laurelled porches, columned halls, marble courts sweet with roses and jasmine, and musical with fountains and the 'pealing' nightingale; beauty in every appointment and appliance, in sphere-blazoned lamps, silver-voiced clocks, silken couch curtains, purple footcloth, desk of satin-wood; most of all, the beauty of symbolic art, of helmed Pallas and crescent-crowned Diana, countless memorials of woman's victory and emblems of woman's aspiration. . .

"But that inner intellectual beauty for which lovely forms and gleaming colors were none too rich a raiment is lacking in this university. If there is any sound scholarship, any genuine quest for truth, any real energy of thought in those 'stately theatres,' we get no hint of it from the mocking reporter."

Perhaps it is not fair to judge of Tennyson's ideas of woman's education by a too close and literal interpretation of The Princess, for after all the poem is but "a medley," a blending of jest and earnest. If the serious student of education turn to the poem for definite help in framing a curriculum for a woman's college, he will be disappointed. What he will find is the expression of

general guiding principles in the stateliest of blank verse.

No

one has ever written more nobly or fairly about woman than has Tennyson in the lines beginning:

"The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink
Together, dwarf'd or godlike, bond or free:
For she that out of Lethe scales with man
The shining steps of Nature, shares with man
His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal,
Stays all the fair young planet in her hands
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow? ...

For woman is not undevelopt man,

But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;

He gain in sweetness and in moral height,

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;

Till at the last she set herself to man

Like perfect music unto noble words;

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
Sit side by side, full-summ'd in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,

Self-reverent each and reverencing each,

Distinct in individualities,

But like each other ev'n as those who love.

Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:

Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm:
Then springs the crowning race of humankind.

May these things be!"

Lyrical Interludes. It is said that Shakspere's songs are so musical that they sing themselves; the same might be said of the interludes that Tennyson inserted in the third edition of 1850. They are among the finest songs in the English language. Their unity, exquisite melody, and appeal to the widest and tenderest of human sympathies make them the best remembered part of

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The Princess. Tennyson introduced them to emphasize his idea that human love and affection are more important than university learning. As he said, the child is the heroine of the poem. Sweet and Low," and the so-called "Bugle Song," are known wherever the English language is spoken. One of the finest illustrations in our literature of the harmony and melody in words is the following poem:

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

"Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

"Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

"Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more."

Tennyson called attention to the fact that few readers of this poem realized that it was an unrhymed lyric.

In Memoriam.-This poem is one of the masterpieces of the nineteenth century; some admirers say it is the masterpiece. It certainly is one of the three greatest elegies in the English language, ranking with Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais. In Memoriam commemorates the early death of Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in Vienna, September 15, 1833. His body was laid away in Clevedon Church, on the banks of the Severn.

career.

"The Danube to the Severn gave

The darkened heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave."

Arthur Henry Hallam was the son of the eminent historian, Henry Hallam, who saw in his son the promise of a brilliant Nor was the father alone in his estimate of the ability of the youthful Hallam. All who associated intimately with him were charmed by his personality and attracted by his ability. Gladstone thought "he resembled a passing emanation from some other and less darkly checkered world;" and late in life the same statesman wrote:

"It is the simple truth that Arthur Henry Hallam was a spirit so exceptional that everything with which he was brought into relation during his shortened passage through this world came to be, through this contact, glorified by a touch of the ideal. . . . In this world there is one unfailing test of the highest excellence. It is that the man should be felt to be greater than his works. And in the case of Arthur Hallam, all that knew him knew that the work was transcended by the man.”

Tennyson and Hallam enjoyed close friendship for five years —

"And those five years its richest field,"

sings the poet in the forty-sixth canto.

In October of the year 1828, they entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Although Alfred was a year and a half older than Arthur, their early acquaintance soon ripened into that rare intimacy so characteristic of college fellowship between men of kindred souls. In the eighty-seventh canto Tennyson gives us a picture of their college life:

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"And last the master-bowman, he

Would cleave the mark. A willing ear
We lent him. Who, but hung to hear
The rapt oration flowing free

"From point to point, with power and grace
And music in the bounds of law,
To those conclusions when we saw
The God within him light his face,

"And seem to lift the form, and glow
In azure orbits heavenly-wise;

And over those ethereal eyes
The bar of Michael Angelo."

When vacation time came Arthur would occasionally accompany his friend to the Somersby rectory, where he met and soon loved Emilia, the charming young sister of the poet. They were betrothed in 1832, the same year in which Hallam left Cambridge to take up the study of law in London. Here his health began to fail and the solicitous father took his boy on a trip to the Continent in search of health and recreation. His condition was not considered serious, consequently the news of his death came as a great shock to the coterie of warm friends whom he had left in England. "The elder Hallam was with him in his room, busy writing letters. His son lay down on a sofa to sleep, and thus he passed peacefully away."

It is sometimes said that had Hallam lived he would have surpassed in achievement all his youthful contemporaries, some of whom became famous; that he would have written finer poetry than Tennyson's, or been more useful as a statesman than Gladstone. This is vain and fruitless speculation. What we do know is that the "fair companionship" of these two gifted young men has resulted in a rare work of art, an elegy which insures young Hallam that deathless fame which an unkind fate did not allow him to achieve for himself.

Time and Structure of In Memoriam.-The elegy is not one long, continuous poem, but rather a series of 131 short poems, with a prologue and an epilogue. These "short swallow-flights of song" are better adapted for the varying moods of sorrow

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