hair by which she might know that it had indeed been he, and to tell her that he died blessing her and his children and Philip. Then "the strong, heroic soul" passed away. He had never accused God; he had never unjustly upbraided man; in the long roll of Christian heroes there is not inscribed a truer hero than Enoch Arden.

Such being the justice done by Tennyson to the peasants, clerks, and seamen of England, may we not say that he is, indeed, a Poet of the People?

Ο

CHAPTER VII.

THE TWO VOICES.

NE of the strongest and most widely-diffused prejudices of the English mind is a prejudice against metaphysics; and most Englishmen would, I fancy, agree that, if there is one thing more objectionable than metaphysical prose, it is metaphysical poetry. Nevertheless, a large proportion of the best dramatic and reflective poetry in the English language, if not strictly definable as metaphysical poetry, attests a strongly metaphysical turn of mind in its authors. No one can have done more than merely skim the surface of Shakespeare's dramas and sonnets, without feeling that the profoundest metaphysical problems had for him an inexhaustible interest. While the whole complicated tissue of man's material existence-the web of passion and motive, with its ever-shifting colours-lay open to the inevitable glance of his supreme intelligence, he never ceased to ponder, in dumb and baffled amazement, upon the mysteries of man's spiritual life, the secrets of the grave, the relation of the human creature to the universe around him. Hamlet is a born metaphysician-so good a metaphysician, one might be tempted to say, as to be good for nothing else. Prospero is a metaphysician :—

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

If we cannot trace the personality of Shakespeare in

Hamlet and in Prospero, we may give up all hope of connecting his character with his dramatic impersonations. Not a little of the most beautiful and imaginative English poetry of the present century was written by Shelley and by Coleridge, and these were almost as much metaphysicians as poets; Wordsworth in his highest mood floated naturally away from the summits of his beloved mountains into the blue infinitude of metaphysics; and Byron, shrewd, practical, sarcastic Byron, proves in Manfred and in Cain, that he knew the fitness of the highest questions of speculation to become subjects of poetry. I have no doubt whatever that there is an affinity between the imaginative and the speculative faculties, and that the poet and the metaphysician are brothers. It would certainly be no extravagant assertion that Plato was as imaginative as Homer.

Tennyson's passion for metaphysics-his feeling of the wonder and mystery of things, and habit of speculative musing-can be traced in his juvenile poems. In the companion pieces, Nothing Will Die, and All Things Will Die, he gives melodious expression to that antithesis of fixity and of change—of uniformity and of variety—of birth and of death—about which philosophers have disputed for thousands of years.

When will the stream be aweary of flowing

Under my eye ?

When will the wind be aweary of blowing

Metaphysical Poetry.

277

Such is the first half of the antithesis. Change is the sole discernible law of the universe. But the second half of the antithesis remains to be stated. Death, the young metaphysician finds, is as much a reality as change.

The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;

The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.

He cannot believe that the world had no beginning, and will have no end.

The old earth

Had a birth,

As all men know,

Long ago.

And the old earth must die.

This is feeble metaphysics, if you will, but the verses evince a metaphysical habit of mind.

The highest result as yet attained by any metaphysician is an intelligent ignorance, a confession that we cannot penetrate the veil of appearance. The lines just quoted are among the earliest of Tennyson's metaphysical utterances ; the following is one of his latest; and in the last, even more than in the first, he is a wondering inquirer, a wistful ponderer, a confessor of enlightened ignorance.

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies ;-
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower-but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

That is to say, all things are linked together; nothing stands in isolation; and we could not know any one thing perfectly without knowing all.

Metaphysical genius, in its real and precious form, is simply a capacity to observe with nice accuracy a particular order of facts. The metaphysican goes to the essence and heart of a thing, looking for a deeper truth than the eye

of sense can discern. Tennyson, for example, gives us a fine instance of metaphysical observation when, in describing, in Maud, an empty shell, “small and pure as a pearl,” he says—

The tiny cell is forlorn,

Void of the little living will

That made it stir on the shore.

I put into italics the words which fix upon the essential characteristic of the living shell: it has a will; it stirs on the shore; it takes, within certain limits, what path it chooses. By accurate observation, you penetrate to this fact; and when you clearly realise it, you perceive that, by this living will, the tenant of the tiny shell is differentiated from all things in the world that have not life and volition. The ability of Professor Tyndall as an observer of mechanical processes cannot be questioned; but he seems to me to exhibit, when placed beside such a thinker as Tennyson or such a thinker as Martineau, that order of mind which is expressly not metaphysical; and the point in which his difference from them has been most conspicuously exhibited is in his failing to perceive that, in a living will, there is a force which the subtlest energies that act in crystallisation, or the most wide and wayward impulses that urge star and comet on their way, do not at all resemble. Within certain limits, the little shell,

Slight, to be crush'd with a tap
Of my finger-nail on the sand,—

is the pilot of its own destiny, the regulator of its own life. That is more than can be said of the brightest sun in the firmament, or of the most vivacious magnet that quivers, with motion so life-like, yet not living, towards the Pole. The true metaphysical genius is displayed in firmly grasping this difference; in remaining unconfused by plausible analogies between living will and dead matter; in peremptorily realising that mechanical motion and volitional