The Catholic World, Vol. 07, April 1868 to September, 1868

by Various

Tennyson In His Catholic Aspects.

For a poet eminently modern and English in his modes of thought, Tennyson is singularly free from the spirit of controversy. His native land is distracted by religious feuds, yet he who has been called "the recognized exponent of all the deeper thinkings of his age," takes no active part in them, and seldom drops a line that bespeaks the school of theology to which he belongs. At long intervals, indeed, devout breathings escape him. Once now and then he extracts a block of dogma from the deep quarry within, and fixes it in an abiding place. He never scatters doubts wantonly; he is always on the side of faith, though not perfect and Catholic faith. He alludes to Christian doctrines as postulates. For his purpose they need no proof. It would be idle to prove anything if they were not true. They are the life of the soul, and the vitality of verse.

"Fly, happy, happy sails, and bear the press,"

he cries; but he adds this apostrophe likewise:

"Fly happy with the mission of the cross."
The Golden Year.

He looks for the resurrection of the body, and bids the dry dust of his friend (Spedding) "lie still, secure of change." (Lines to J. S.) When the spirit quits its earthly frame, he follows it straight into the unseen world and the presence of its Creator and God. He points to "the grand old gardener and his wife" in "yon blue heavens," smiling at the claims of long descent, (Lady Clara Vere de Vere;) and he speeds the soul of the expiring May Queen toward the blessed home of just souls and true, there to wait a little while for her mother and Effie:

"To lie within the light of God, as I lie upon your breast—
Where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest."
The May Queen.

Intensely as he loves nature, Tennyson is no Pantheist. Though like the wild Indian, he "sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind," he does not therefore confound matter with its Maker, nor lose sight of the personality of the Being whom he adores. He is no disciple of fate or chance, but recognizes in all human affairs the working of a divine and retributive providence, whose final judgment of good and evil is foreshadowed and begun during our mortal life. To His presence and promptitude in reply to prayer, he refers more than once in pathetic and pointed language. He tells us how Enoch Arden, when cast away on a desert island, heard in his dream "the pealing of his parish bells," and

"Though he knew not wherefore, started up
Shuddering, and when the beauteous, hateful isle
Returned upon him, had not his poor heart
Spoken with that, which, being everywhere.
Lets none who speak with Him seem all alone,
Surely the man had died of solitude."
Enoch Arden.

It would not be difficult for those who are acquainted with Tennyson's earlier history, to discover the church of which he is a member, and the section of it whose views he adopts. In Memoriam takes us into the interior of his father's parsonage, to the Christmas hearth decorated with laurel, and the old pastimes in the hall; to the witch-elms and towering sycamore, whose shadows his Arthur had often found so fair; to the lawn where they read the Tuscan poets together; and the banquet in the neighboring summer woods. We almost hear the songs that then pealed from knoll to knoll, while the happy tenants of the presbytery lingered on the dry grass till bats went round in fragrant skies, and the white kine glimmered, couching at ease, and the trees laid their dark arms about the field. "The merry, merry bells of Yule," with their silver chime, are referred to more than once in Tennyson's poems. They seem to be ever ringing in his ears. They controlled him, he says, in his boyhood, and they bring him sorrow touched with joy.

It is in singing of Arthur Hallam that the poet's faith in the immortality of the soul is brought out with beautiful clearness. The bitterness of his grief draws him to the "comfort clasped in truth revealed," and he looks forward with hope to the day when he shall arrive at last at the blessed goal, and He who died in Holy Land shall reach out the shining hand to him and his lost friend, and take them "as a single soul." (In Memoriam, lxxxiii.)

From the verses addressed to the Rev. F. D. Maurice, (January, 1854.) we learn that one of Tennyson's children claims that gentleman as his godfather, and we gather from it and other poems, what all the Laureate's friends know, that his sympathies are with the Broad Church, of which Mr. Maurice, Kingsley, Temple, the Bishop of London, and Dr. Stanley are distinguished leaders. It is one of the peculiarities of this school to moderate the torments of the lost and to deny that they are eternal, to hope that good will in some way be the final goal of ill, and that every winter will at last change to spring. It cannot be disputed that this teaching is at variance with Catholic doctrine; but it is one which Tennyson puts forward with singular modesty, describing himself as

"An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light;
And with no language but a cry."
In Memoriam, liii.

The Broad Church, as its name implies, professes large and liberal views. Not wishing to be tried by too strict a standard itself, it repudiates all harsh judgments on others. Accordingly, we find in Tennyson few allusions to errors, real or supposed, in the creed of others. He regards as sacred whatever links the soul to a divine truth. He has many friends who are Catholics, and we have heard that he has expressed sincere anxiety to publish nothing relative to the Catholic religion calculated to give offence to its followers. There are few lines in his volumes which grate on the most pious ear, and no devout breathings in which we do not cordially join. It is in one of his earlier poems, and only in sport, that he makes the Talking Oak tell of—

"Old summers, when the monk was fat,
And, issuing shorn and sleek,
Would twist his girdle tight, and pat
The girls upon the cheek,
Ere yet, in scorn of Peter's pence,
And numbered bead, and shrift.
Bluff Harry broke into the spence,
And turned the cowls adrift."

In conning his verse, therefore, the Catholic mind is at ease; it lights on no charges to be repelled, and (so far as we know, after long and close study of every line he has published) no mistakes regarding our faith which require to be rectified. There are those who imagine that in St. Simeon Stylites, he has wilfully misrepresented the character of a Catholic saint; but we venture to entertain a more lenient opinion, and shall endeavor presently to justify it. It is in a tone of irony, such as we must admire, that he describes the "heated pulpiteer in chapel, not preaching simple Christ to simple men," but fulminating "against the scarlet woman and her creed," and swinging his arms violently, as if he held the apocalyptic millstone, while he predicts the speedy casting of great Babylon into the sea. (Sea Dreams.) Nor are there wanting points of contact between Tennyson's ideas on religious matters and some of those dwelt on by Catholic divines. Thus he, like Dr. Newman, finds the arguments for the existence of God drawn from the power and wisdom discoverable in the works of nature, cold and inconclusive in comparison with that one which arises from the voice of conscience and the feelings of the heart. The cxxiiid section of In Memoriam runs singularly parallel with this beautiful passage in the Apologia, (p. 377:)

"Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist or a polytheist, when I looked into the world. ... I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society; but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice."

The arguments adduced by infidels, in support of their unbelief, have never been rebutted in verse more cleverly than by Tennyson. His blade flashes like lightning, and severs with as fine a stroke as Saladin's scimitar. The Two Voices may be cited in proof, and also the following passages in the matchless elegy on Arthur Hallam:

The Fates not blind,	(In Memoriam) iii.
Life shall live for evermore.	(In Memoriam) xxxiv.
If Death were death, love would not be true love,	(In Memoriam) xxxv.
Individuality defies the tomb,	(In Memoriam) xlvi.
Immortality,	(In Memoriam) liv. lv.
Doubt issuing in belief.	(In Memoriam) xcv.
Knowledge without wisdom.	(In Memoriam) cxiii.
Progress,	(In Memoriam) cxvii.
We are not all matter.	(In Memoriam) cxix.
The course of human things,	(In Memoriam) cxxvii

These verses are no doubt the record of a mental conflict carried on during some years of the author's earlier life—a battle between materialism and spiritualism, between faith and unbelief, reason and sense. The Two Voices is philosophy singing, as In Memoriam is philosophy in tears. The English Cyclopaedia well calls the last poem "wonderful," and adds: "In no language, probably, is there another series of elegies so deep, so metaphysical, so imaginative, so musical, and showing such impassioned, abnormal, and solemnizing affection for the dead."

But it is now time to point to those passages in which Tennyson may be said to have, more particularly, Catholic aspects. Be they few or many, they are worth noticing, even though they prove nothing but that a Protestant poet of the highest order has such aspects, intense, striking, and lovely in no ordinary degree. Every true poet is in a certain sense a divine creation, and nothing but a celestial spark could ignite a Wordsworth, a Longfellow, or an Emerson. It has ever been the delight of the ancient church and her writers to discover portions of her truth among those who are separated from her visible pale. Far from grudging them these precious fragments, she only wishes they were less scanty, and would willingly add to them till they reached the full measure of the deposit of the faith. It would be easy to make out a complete cycle of her doctrine in faith and morals from the poems of Protestant and Mohammedan authors, but it would be only by combining extracts from many who, in matters of belief, differ widely from each other. In looking through the Laureate's volumes for traces of the church's teaching, we are in a special manner struck by his treatment of the invocation of the departed. With what deep feeling does he invite the friend, who is the subject of his immortal elegy, to be near him when his light is low, when pain is at its height, when life is fading away. (In Memoriam, xlix.) It reminds us of good Dr. Johnson's prayer for the "attention and ministration" of his lost wife, as Boswell has given it us. Can any Catholic express more fully than the Laureate the frame of mind becoming those who desire that the departed should still be near them at their side? (In Memoriam, 1.)

"How pure at heart and sound in head,
With what divine affections bold.
Should be the man whose thoughts would hold
An hour's communion with the dead.
"In vain shall thou, or any, call
The spirits from their golden day,
Except, like them, thou too canst say,
My spirit is at peace with all.
"They haunt the silence of the breast,
Imaginations calm and fair,
The memory like a cloudless air,
The conscience as a sea at rest.
"But when the heart is full of din,
And doubt beside the portal waits.
They can but listen at the gates.
And hear the household jar within."
In Memoriam, xciii.

"If I can," says the dying May Queen in New Year's Eve—

"If I can, I'll come again, mother, from out my resting-place;
Though you'll not see me, mother, I shall look upon your face;
Though I cannot speak a word, I shall hearken what you say,
And be often, often with you, when you think I'm far away."

It is not, therefore, in a vague and dreamy way, but with the full force of the understanding, that Tennyson invokes the spirits in their place of rest. It is not merely as a poet, but as a Christian, that he exclaims:

"Oh! therefore, from thy sightless range,
With gods in unconjectured bliss.
Oh from the distance of the abyss
Of tenfold, complicated change,
"Descend, and touch, and enter: hear
The wish too strong for words to name;
That in the blindness of the frame
My ghost may feel that thine is near."
In Memoriam, xcii.

We say "as a Christian;" for we warmly repudiate the harsh interpretation which is often put on his words addressed to the Son of God:

"Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood thou."

"See," it is said, "this is the most you can get from your favorite about Christ—that he seems divine. It is an appearance, a semblance only." Now, this reasoning is most unfair. The remainder of the verse implies his godhead—

"Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine."

The verses which follow are a prayer to Christ, imploring from him light and aid, wisdom and forgiveness. (Prefatory lines to In Memoriam) In fact, it is evident from other parts of Tennyson's elegy, that he does not use the word seem in the sense of appearing to be what a thing is not, but in the sense of its appearing to be what it is. Thus, in the fifth stanza, below the lines just quoted, we have—

"Forgive what seemed my sin in me;
What seemed my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord! to thee."

So again, In Memoriam, xxxiii.,

"O thou that after toil and storm,
May'st seem to have reached a purer air;"

where "seem to have reached" is equivalent to "thou who hast reached," with that delicate shade of difference only which belongs to Greek rather than to English diction. Thus the verb [Greek text] is repeatedly used in the New Testament as an expletive, not meaningless to the ear, though adding no distinct idea which can be expressed in a single word, [Greek text], (St. Matt. iii. 9,) means to all intents, simply, "Say not in yourselves," and [Greek text] (Gal. ii. 9) means, "who were really the pillars they seemed to be." Such passages, it is true, prove nothing as to Tennyson's use of the word seem, but they do illustrate it. The perfect godhead of Christ is brought out fully in the sermon preached by Averill in Aylmer's Field. "The Lord from heaven, born of a village girl, carpenter's son," is there styled in the prophet's words, "Wonderful, Prince of Peace, the Mighty God."

When the Laureate prays that his very worth may be forgiven, he employs the language of deep humility which meets us so constantly in the writings of Catholic saints. It reminds us of their prayers to the Father of Lights that the best they have ever done may be pardoned, that their tears may be washed, their myrrh incensed, their spikenard's scent perfumed, and their breathings after God fumigated. It is no shallow view that he takes of repentance when he makes Queen Guinevere ask:

"What is true repentance but in thought—
Not e'en in inmost thought to think again
The sins that made the past so pleasant to us?"
Idylls of the King.

He has been accused of making St. Simeon Stylites a self-righteous saint. That he makes him ambitious of saintdom is true, but this hope which he "will not cease to grasp," is fostered by no sense of his own merits, but, on the contrary, springs from the deepest possible conviction of his unworthiness. He describes himself as

"The basest of mankind,
From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,
Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet
For troops of devils mad with blasphemy."

He proclaims from his pillar, his "high nest of penance,"

"That Pontius and Iscariot by his side
Showed like fair seraphs."

He details, indeed, in language strikingly intense, his sufferings, prayers, and penances; but he disclaims all praise on account of them, and ascribes all his patience to the divine bounty. He does not breathe or "whisper any murmur of complaint," while he tells how his teeth

"Would chatter with the cold, and all his beard
Was tagged with icy fringes in the moon;"

how his "thighs were rotted with the dew;" and how

"For many weeks about his loins he wore
The rope that haled the buckets from the well.
Twisted as tight as I could knot the noose;"

yet the climax of it all is, "Have mercy, mercy: take away my sin."

The Catholic aspects in St. Agnes' Eve and Sir Galahad, are no less marked than those of St. Simeon Stylites. As a devout breathing of a dying nun, the first of these poems is touching and exquisite. The snows lie deep on the convent-roof, and the shadows of its towers "slant down the snowy sward," while she prays and says:

"As these white robes are soiled and dark.
To yonder shining ground;
As this pale taper's earthly spark,
To yonder argent round;
So shows my soul before the Lamb,
My spirit before Thee;
So in mine earthly house I am,
To that I hope to be."

All heaven bursts its "starry floors," the gates roll back, the heavenly Bridegroom waits to welcome and purify the sister's departing soul. The vision dilates. It is mysteriously vague—mysteriously distinct:

"The sabbaths of eternity.
One sabbath deep and wide—
A light upon the shining sea—
The Bridegroom with his bride!"

There is in such verse an indescribably Catholic tone. It is like the heavenly music of faith, which pervades the Paradise of Dante, and which (in spite of the lax lives of the authors) runs through the "Sacred Songs" of Moore, and the Epistle of Eloisa, and The Dying Christian's Address to his Soul, by Pope. But if Tennyson has proved equal to portraying a Catholic saint, he has also depicted most graphically a Catholic knight of romance. Sir Galahad, one of the ornaments of King Arthur's court, (Idylls of the King., p. 213,) whose

"strength is as the strength of ten,
Because his heart is pure,"

goes in quest of the Sangreal—the sacred wine. He hears the noise of hymns amid the dark stems of the forest, sees in vision the snowy altar-cloth with swinging censers and "silver vessels sparkling clean." He sails, in magic barks, on "lonely mountain meres," and catches glimpses of angels with folded feet "in stoles of white," bearing the holy grail.

"Ah! blessed vision! blood of God! My spirit beats her mortal bars.
As down dark tides the glory slides,
And star-light mingles with the stars. ...
So pass I hostel, hall, and grange.
By bridge and ford, by park and pale.
All armed I ride, whate'er betide.
Until I find the holy grail."
Poems, p. 336.

A Catholic aspect may sometimes be observed in a single word. "And so thou lean on our fair father Christ," (Idylls, Guinevere, p. 254,) may perhaps sound strange to some ears, and is familiar to Catholics only. "He alone is our inward life," says Dr. Newman, speaking of Christ; "He not only regenerates us, but (to allude to a higher mystery) semper gignit; he is ever renewing our new birth and our heavenly sonship. In this sense he may be called, as in nature so in grace, our real Father." (Letter to Dr. Pusey, p. 89.) Hence, in the Litany of the Holy Name we say, "Jesu, Pater futuri seculi," and "Jesu, Pater pauperum."

The Catholic who well understands his own faith will always be very scrupulous about disturbing that of others. If there is anything abhorrent to him, "it is the scattering doubt and unsettling consciences without necessity." (Newman's Apologia, p. 344.) There is a well-known poem in In Memoriam, (xxxiii.,) which admirably illustrates this feeling. We quote but one verse, as the reader's memory will no doubt supply the rest.

"Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse
A life that leads melodious ways."

The theory and practice of the wisest Catholics conform to the spirit and letter of this injunction. Their devotional life, too, is perfectly reflected in Tennyson whenever he writes of prayer. There is a depth of feeling in his expressions on this subject which reaches to the fact that prayer is the truest religion—that it is the link which unites man more closely to his Creator than any outward acts, any meditations, any professed creed, and is the spring and current of religious life.

"Evermore
Prayer from a living source within the will,
And beating up through all the bitter world,
Like fountains of sweet water in the sea,
Kept him a living soul"
Enoch Arden, p. 44.
"Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers.
Whose loves in higher love endure:
What souls possess themselves so pure?
Or is there blessedness like theirs?"
In Memoriam, xxxii.

Thus again, in the Morte d'Arthur, which was a forecast of The Idylls of the King, we are reminded of the efficacy of prayer in language worthy of being put into a Catholic's lips:

"Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats.
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."

In the following lines, on the rarity of repentance, there is a reference to the coöperation of human will with divine grace, which equals the precision of a Catholic theologian:

"Full seldom does a man repent, or use Both grace and will to pick the vicious quitch
Of blood and custom wholly out of him.
And make all clean, and plant himself afresh."
Idylls of the King, p. 93.

In the same poem we find lines of a distinctly Catholic tone on the repentant queen's entering a convent, and on a knight who had long been the tenant of a hermitage. Guinevere speaks as follows:

"So let me, if you do not shudder at me,
Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;
Wear black and white, and be a nun like you;
Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;
Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys.
Bid not rejoicing; mingle with your rites;
Pray and be prayed for; lie before your shrines;
Do each low office of your holy house;
Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole
To poor sick people, richer in his eyes
Who ransomed us, and haler, too, than I;
And treat their loathsome hurts, and heal mine own;
And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer
The sombre close of that voluptuous day
Which wrought the ruin of my lord the king."
Idylls of the King, p. 260.

The hermitage is thus described:

"There lived a knight
Not far from Camelot, now for forty years
A hermit, who had prayed, labored, and prayed.
And ever laboring had scooped himself
In the white rock a chapel and a hall
On massive columns, like a shorecliff cave.
And cells and chambers: all were fair and dry."
Idylls of the King, p. 168.

Among Tennyson's earlier poems, the picture of Isabel, "the perfect wife," with her "hate of gossip parlance, and of sway," her

"locks not wide dispread.
Madonna-wise on either side her head;
Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign
The summer calm of golden charity;"

and

"Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed
With the clear-pointed flame of chastity,"
Poems, pp. 7, 8,

is worthy of a Catholic matron. The description of St. Stephen, in The Two Voices, has all the depth and pathos of the poet's happiest mood; and, though neither it, nor some other passages which have been quoted, contain anything distinctively Catholic as opposed to other forms of Christianity, it is strongly marked with those orthodox instincts to which we are drawing attention:

"I cannot hide that some have striven,
Achieving calm, to whom was given
The joy that mixes man with heaven;
Who, rowing hard against the stream,
Saw distant gates of Eden gleam.
And did not dream it was a dream;
But heard, by secret transport led,
E'en in the charnels of the dead,
The murmur of the fountain-head—
Which did accomplish their desire,
Bore and forbore, and did not tire;
Like Stephen, an unquenched fire,
He heeded not reviling tones.
Nor sold his heart to idle moans.
Though cursed, and scorned, and bruised with stones;
But looking upward, full of grace.
He prayed, and from a happy place
God's glory smote him on the face."
Poems, p. 299.

We are anxious not to appear to lay undue stress on these extracts. Let them go for as much as they are worth, and no more. We do not stretch them on any Procrustean bed to the measure of orthodox. Others might be adduced, of a latitudinarian tendency, but they are few in number, and do not neutralize the force of these. In view of many passages in Shakespeare of a Catholic bearing, and of several facts favorable to the belief that he was a Catholic, M. Rio has come to the probably sound conclusion that he really was what he himself wishes to prove him. We put no such forced interpretation on our extracts from Tennyson as M. Rio has certainly put on many which he has brought forward from the Elizabethan poet; but we think that they are sufficiently cast in a Catholic mould to warrant us in applying to Tennyson the words which Carlyle has used in reference to his predecessor: "Catholicism, with and against feudalism, but not against nature and her bounty, gave us English a Shakespeare and era of Shakespeare, and so produced a blossom of Catholicism." (French Revolution, vol. i. 10.)

But religion, as we have said, does not occupy a prominent place in Tennyson's pages. He is, in the main, like the great dramatist—a poet of this world. Love and women are his favorite themes, but love within the bounds of law, and woman strongly idealized. License finds in him no apologist, while he throws around purity and fidelity all the charms of song. The most rigid moralist can find nothing to censure in his treatment of the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere, the wedded love of Enid and Geraint, the meretricious love of Vivien, and the unrequited love of Elaine. If Milton had, as he intended, [Footnote 43] chosen King Arthur as the subject of his epic, he could not have taken a higher moral tone than Tennyson has in the Idylls of the King, and, considering how lax were his notions about marriage, it is probable he would have taken a lower one.

[Footnote 43: See his Mansas, and Life, by Toland, p. 17.]

King Arthur's praise of honorable courtship and conjugal faith is too long to be quoted here, but it may be referred to as equally eloquent and edifying. (Idylls of the King.)

The Laureate has learned at least one secret of making a great name—not to write too much. "I hate many books," wrote Père Lacordaire. "The capital point is, to have an aim in life, and deeply to respect posterity by sending it but a small number of well-meditated works." This has been Tennyson's rule. With six slender volumes he has built himself an everlasting name. He has, till within the last few months, seldom contributed to periodicals, and when he has done so, the price paid for his stanzas seems fabulous. The estimation in which he is held by critics of a high order amounts, in many cases, to a passion and a worship. The specimen he has given of a translation of the Iliad promises for it, if completed, all that Longfellow has wrought for the Divina Commedia. The attempts he has made at Alcaics, Hendecasyllabics, and Galliambics in English have been thoroughly successful, and stamp him as an accomplished scholar. (Boädicea, etc., in Enoch Arden and other Poems.) As he does not write much, so neither does he write fast. The impetuous oratory of Shakespeare's and Byron's verse is unknown to him. He never affects it. He reminds us rather of the operations of nature, who slowly and calmly, but without difficulty, produces her marvellous results. Drop by drop his immortal poems are distilled, like the chalybeate droppings which leave at length on the cavern floor a perfect red and crystal stalagmite. "Day by day," says the National Review, when speaking on this subject—"day by day, as the hours pass, the delicate sand falls into beautiful forms, in stillness, in peace, in brooding." "The particular power by which Mr. Tennyson surpasses all recent English poets," writes the Edinburgh Review, "is that of sustained perfection. ... We look in vain among his modern rivals for any who can compete with him in the power of saying beautifully the thing he has to say."

O degli altri poeti onore e lume,
Vagliami 'l lungo studio e 'l grande amore
Che m' han fatto cercar lo tuo volume. [Footnote 44]

[Footnote 44: L Inferno, i. 82.]

During a long period, the originality of Tennyson's verse was an obstacle to its fame, and indeed continues to be so in the minds of some readers. His use of obsolete words appears to many persons affected, while others applaud him for his vigorous Saxon, believing, with Dean Swift, that the Saxon element in our compound tongue should be religiously preserved, and that the writers and speakers who please us most are those whose style is most Saxon in its character. If Tennyson has modelled his verse after any author, it is undoubtedly Shakespeare, and the traces of this study may perhaps be found in his vocabulary. Yet no man is less of a plagiarist; not only his forms of thought but of language also are original, and though he owes much to the early dramatists, to Wordsworth and to Shelley, he fuses all metals in the alembic of his own mind, and turns them to gold. His love of nature is intense, and his observation of her works is microscopic. Yet he is never so occupied with details as to lose sight of broad outlines. In 1845, Wordsworth spoke of him as "decidedly the first of our living poets;" but since that time his fame has been steadily on the increase. Many of his lines have passed into proverbs, and a crowd of feebly fluttering imitators have vainly striven to rival him on the wing. What the people once called a weed has grown into a tall flower, wearing a crown of light, and flourishing far and wide. (The Flower. Enoch Arden, etc., p. 152.) A concordance to In Memoriam has been published, and the several editions of the Laureate's volumes have been collated as carefully as if they were works of antiquity. Every ardent lover of English poetry is familiar with Mariana, "in the lonely moated grange;" the good Haroun Alraschid among his obelisks and cedars; Oriana wailing amid the Norland whirlwinds; the Lady Shalott in her "four gray walls and four gray towers;" the proud Lady Clara Vere de Vere; the drowsy Lotos-Eaters; the chaste and benevolent Godiva; Maud in her garden of "woodbine spices;" the true love of the Lord of Burleigh, and the reward of honest Lady Clare. The highest praise of these ballads is that they have sunk into the nation's heart. They combine the chief excellences of other bards, and remind us of some delicious fruit which unites in itself a variety of the most exquisite flavors. This richness and sweetness may be ascribed in part to that remarkable condensation of thought which enriches one page of Tennyson with as many ideas and images as would, in most other poets, be found scattered over two or three pages. "We must not expect," wrote Shenstone in one of his essays, "to trace the flow of Waller, the landskip of Thomson, the fire of Dryden, the imagery of Shakespeare, the simplicity of Spenser, the courtliness of Prior, the humor of Swift, the wit of Cowley, the delicacy of Addison, the tenderness of Otway, and the invention, the spirit, and sublimity of Milton, joined in any single writer." Perhaps not. But Shenstone had never read Tennyson, and there is no knowing what he might have thought if he had conned the calm majesty of Ulysses; the classical beauty of Tithonus and the Princess; the luxuriant eloquence of Locksley Hall; the deep lyrical flow of The Letters and The Voyage; the 'cute drollery of the Northern Farmer; the idyllic sweetness of OEnone; the grandeur of Morte d'Arthur; the touching simplicity of Enoch Arden; the power and pathos of Aylmer's Field; the perfect minstrelsy of the Rivulet, and the songs, O Swallow, Swallow, and Tears, Idle Tears; and the sharps and trebles of the Brook, more musical than Mendelssohn.

Far be it from us to carp at any poetry because it proceeds from one who is not a Catholic. We believe, indeed, firmly that, if Tennyson had been imbued with the ancient faith, it would have cleared some vagueness both from his mind and his verse. But in these days, when Socinianism, positivism, and free-thinking in various shapes are taking such strong hold of educated men, we rejoice unfeignedly to find popular writings marked, even in an imperfect degree, with Christian doctrine and feeling. The influence exerted by the Laureate in the world of letters is great, and we have, therefore, endeavored at some length to show how far it is favorable, and how far unfavorable, to the cause of truth. Though unhappily not a Catholic, we recognize with delight the fact that he is not an infidel, and we feel persuaded that some at least of our readers will be pleased at our having placed in a prominent point of view the redeeming features in the religious character of his poetry.

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