Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.
Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
Mother-Age! (for mine I knew not,) help me as when life begun:
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the sun—
O I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set;
Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet."
Who shall say, after this, that Alfred Tennyson wants power? There speaks the man of this moving age. There speaks the spirit baptized into the great spirit of progress. In the silence of his meditative retreat the poet sees the world rolling before him, and is struck with the majesty of its mind subduing its physical mass to its uses, and trampling on time, space, and the far greater evils—prejudice, false patriotism, and falser ideas of glory. Brotherhood, peace, and comfort advance out of the school and the shop, and happiness sits securely beneath the guardianship of
"The parliament of man, the federation of the world."
Alfred Tennyson has given many a fatal blow to many an old and narrow maxim in his poems; he has breathed into his latter ones the generous and the victorious breath of noblest philanthropy, the offspring of the great renovator—the Christian religion. This will give him access to the bosoms of the multitude—