he has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just conception of the grandeur of a poet’s destiny; and we look to him for its fulfilment. . . . If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may be read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own works.”

Two years later, that is, in 1832 (the volume, however, is antedated 1833), appeared ‘Poems by Alfred Tennyson’, pp. 163. In it were contained ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and the untitled poems, known by their first lines, ‘You ask me why, tho’ ill at ease’, ‘Of old sat Freedom on the Heights’, and ‘Love thou thy Land, with Love far brought’.

In ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is mystically shadowed forth the relation which poetic genius should sustain to the world for whose spiritual redemption it labors, and the fatal consequences of its being seduced by the world’s temptations, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

The other poems, ‘You ask me why’, ‘Of old sat Freedom’, and ‘Love thou thy land’, are important as exponents of what may be called the poet’s institutional creed. A careful study of his subsequent poetry will show that in these early poems he accurately and distinctly revealed the attitude toward outside things which he has since maintained. He is a good deal of an institutional poet, and, as compared with Browning, a STRONGLY institutional poet. Browning’s supreme and all-absorbing interest is in individual souls. He cares but little, evidently, about institutions. At any rate, he gives them little or no place in his poetry. Tennyson is a very decided reactionary product of the revolutionary spirit which inspired some of his poetical predecessors of the previous generation. He has a horror of the revolutionary. To him, the French Revolution was “the blind hysterics of the Celt”, {‘In Memoriam’, cix.}, and “the red fool-fury of the Seine” {‘I. M.’, cxxvii.}. He attaches great importance to the outside arrangements of society for upholding and advancing the individual. He would “make Knowledge circle with the winds”, but “her herald, Reverence”, must

“fly
Before her to whatever sky
Bear seed of men and growth of minds.”

He has a great regard for precedents, almost AS precedents. He is emphatically the poet of law and order. All his sympathies are decidedly, but not narrowly, conservative. He is, in short, a choice product of nineteenth century ENGLISH civilization; and his poetry may be said to be the most distinct expression of the refinements of English culture—refinements, rather than the ruder but more vital forms of English strength and power. All his ideals of institutions and the general machinery of life, are derived from England. She is

“the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land where, girt with friends or foes,
A man may speak the thing he will;
A land of SETTLED GOVERNMENT,
A LAND OF JUST AND OLD RENOWN,
WHERE FREEDOM BROADENS SLOWLY DOWN
FROM PRECEDENT TO PRECEDENT:
Where faction seldom gathers head,
But by degrees to fullness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.”

But the anti-revolutionary and the institutional features of Tennyson’s poetry are not those of the higher ground of his poetry. They are features which, though primarily due, it may be, to the poet’s temperament, are indirectly due to the particular form of civilization in which he has lived, and moved, and had his culture, and which he reflects more than any of his poetical contemporaries.

The most emphasized and most vitalized idea, the idea which glints forth everywhere in his poetry, which has the most important bearing on man’s higher life, and which marks the height of the spiritual tide reached in his poetry, is, that the highest order of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which INFORMS his poem of ‘The Princess’. It is prominent in ‘In Memoriam’ and in ‘The Idylls of the King’. In ‘The Princess’, the Prince, speaking of the relations of the sexes, says:—

“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.”