have been more and more addressing themselves. Granted that all falsehood and superstition must be cast aside, that kings and priests, if they are to exist at all, must, like the Sabbath, exist for man,-What then? Is there any truth that will endure? Are there any laws in accordance with which society can be rightly constituted? M. Taine does not allege that Alfred de Musset professed or attempted to answer such questions. There is, indeed, a living French poet who has attempted to answer them, and I confess to being somewhat surprised that M. Taine, in selecting from the French poets of the century a rival to Tennyson, did not mention one who seems to me incomparably greater than De Musset-Victor Hugo. To rear the edifice of a reconstituted society is a task which Hugo expressly undertakes, proudly claiming for himself to have contributed something towards setting up two of its chief pillars"respect for the old, and love for children." But it is not to the streets of Paris, glaring with the lights of café and theatre, that Victor Hugo would send the poet for a true inspiration; nor would he accept it as the task of the poetic seer to minister new excitement to forlorn profligates, whose faces are wrinkled and heads bald at thirty. His counsel to the poet is to go to the woods and the shores, and to beat out the music of his verse in tune with the song of the leaves, and the hymn of the waves; or, to take it in his own bright, melodious French : : Va dans les bois, va sur les plages; Compose tes chants inspirés Avec la chanson des feuillages Et l'hymne des flots azurés ! Adopting Hugo's imagery, I should say that, among the pillars of a reconstituted society which Tennyson has laboured to set up, the most conspicuous have been responsibility to God and reverent trust in the Supreme; faithfulness and constancy in the marriage relationship; The Pillars of Society. 217 mutual affection and mutual fitness, in contradistinction to worldly advantage, as the terms and motives of the marriage tie; love of mankind, love of country, enthusiasm for knowledge, faith in freedom, hope of immortality. A stable and happy society in which these, or at least most of them, should not be found, is the dream of sheer delirium, and any "liberty" which should permit them to be trodden down would but unchain the brute elements in human nature, to tear and rend each other in the slime of a devastated civilisation. I do not, of course, affirm that society must be constituted as our present society is constituted. Plato, in his Republic, sketches a very different order of society from ours, but in his scheme also licence and disorder are absolutely put down. The day has gone by when civilised nations can undergo the discipline of political or ecclesiastical slavery; but it is essential to their well-being that the discipline of freedom, the discipline of virtue, the discipline of justice, truth, and law, should succeed the discipline of slavery. Tennyson has been the foe of conventionality, and has cut sharp and deep into "the social lies that warp us from the living truth;" as M. Taine admits, he has been the partisan of no ecclesiastical system; but Carlyle himself has not looked with loftier disdain upon those ravings of the Satanic school, according to which the coming race is to obliterate all moral codes, and to pig in sensual brutishness amid the crumbling débris of the sanctuary and the home. M. Taine has all the right in the world to prefer Alfred de Musset to Tennyson, but I cannot recognise the justice of his application to Tennyson of the term "dilettante." To be scrupulously fair, indeed, I must say that he does not give Tennyson this name directly. Alfred de Musset, he tells us," was not a mere dilettante, content with tasting and enjoying;" and as he is expressly contrasting the French with the English poet, we cannot help feeling that he intends to imply that Tennyson is what De Musset was not. A dilettante poet I take to be one who puts together his poems and polishes them up verse by verse, in the spirit in which a virtuoso collects cups or vases, for the pleasure of looking at them, and the vanity of being known to possess them, without any view to expressing truth or benefiting mankind. Once or twice Tennyson may have written in this mood. The Day-Dream, perfect as is its workmanship, is little more than a play of fancy, light and brilliant as the tints of sunlight in foam. If its delightfulness is not enough to warrant its production, as I believe it to be, the poet has no better apology for producing it. But in general Tennyson writes with deep and solemn purpose, and it ought to have occurred to M. Taine that an English poet might be as sincere and earnest in celebrating a pure morality as a Parisian poet in revelling in paradox, extravagance, and vice. Tennyson grew up amid a society which, in the vital organs, was substantially sound. France the succession, since the seventeenth century, had been triumphant Popery, consolidated despotism, Voltairism, rebellion, despair; in England it had been Protestantism, constitutional government, scientific and industrial progress. If Alfred de Musset proved his sincerity by being true to the prevailing sentiment of France, Tennyson proved his sincerity by being true to the practical ideal which he saw around him in England. Society in France I believe to be now much more sound; but it is of the France and the England of 1830 that I have been speaking. In THE CHAPTER III. TENNYSON'S POEMS ON MARRIAGE. HE earliest poem in which Tennyson takes for his subject the marriage relationship is The Miller's Daughter, the earliest, and in some respects the most delightful, though not, by a great deal, the most powerful. What is, perhaps, most surprising about it is that it should be the work of a young man; for though it breathes the sweetest freshness of youth, it contains the quintessence of what I cannot define except by coining the queer-looking word, " elderly-gentleman-liness." It is pervaded with the pensive quietude, the subdued but mellow radiance, of life's afternoon. With consummate dramatic power the unmarried poet relates the experience, and depicts the feelings, of one who has been long married. Other young poets have bestirred themselves to give burning expression to the ardour of the lover-to show the flaming eyes and heaving breast of Apollo as he pursued his Daphne; young Tennyson throws his strength into verses in which are described the proud constancy, the satisfied devotion, of the husband. Look thro' mine eyes with thine. True wife, Round my true heart thine arms entwine; My other dearer life in life, Look thro' my very soul with thine! Goethe's, Schiller's, Burns's lovers speak of moments of rapture; this lover speaks of the peace that has been the atmosphere of his life for many years. The kiss, The woven arms, seem but to be The comfort, I have found in thee. The scenery of the poem is no longer that of Lincolnshire; it is that which surrounds Cambridge. A mill is pointed out in the vicinity of that town, which can stand as well for the mill of the poem as the cottage under Salisbury Crags at Edinburgh, shown as that of David Deans, stands for the cottage in which Scott placed the heroine of the Heart of Midlothian. Here, as always, Tennyson paints by particular touches, not by vague generalities. In the crystal eddies of the mill-dam, the minnows "glance and poise." If you looked at minnows every day for a week, you would not learn much more about them than lies in these two words. The whole biography of a minnow is there. To poise in perfect stillness and almost perfect invisibility, and then to become visible for the tenth part of a second in that strange glancing gleam, or glint, of the silvery side, as the tiny creature darts away,—this is the complete circle of a minnow's observable activities. There is a subtle imaginative keeping, though the poet probably had no thought of it, between the quietness of emotional tone throughout the poem and the circumstance that the lover first sees Alice reflected in water. "The reflex of a beauteous form, a glowing arm, a gleaming neck," caught his eye in the mill-dam as he was listlessly angling; he looked up, he saw her leaning from the window-ledge, their eyes met, and they loved. There is a curious maturity of observation in the following verse. My mother thought, What ails the boy? For I was alter'd and began To move about the house with joy, And with the certain step of man. A piece of knowledge this which one would expect to be more clearly apprehended by an old man than by a |