FRESHWATER BAY
day. Not that he is a fusion of conflicting tendencies, but that he occupies a central position, equally remote from the excesses of scepticism and the excesses of devotion. This position he is able to fill from his relation to Coleridge, the great exponent of the via media: not, as in former days, between Protestantism and Romanism, but between orthodoxy and free thought. Tennyson cannot, indeed, be termed Coleridge’s intellectual heir. As a thinker he is far below his predecessor, and almost devoid of originality; but as a poet he fills up the measure of what was lacking in Coleridge, whose season of speculation hardly arrived until the season of poetry was past. Tennyson was but one of a band of auditors—it might be too much to call them disciples—of the sage who, curiously enough, had himself been a Cambridge man, and who, short and unsatisfactory as had been his residence at that seat of learning,
From a drawing by Gustave Doré
GUINEVERE
(Reproduced from the “Illustrations to Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King,’” by kind permission of Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co.)
