motion cannot be resolved into one another, but are essentially distinct.

It is required of all poetry, without exception, that it shall be lovely and picture-like to the eye, and tuneful to the ear. These conditions cannot be relaxed in favour of metaphysical poetry. Since, therefore, metaphysical truth is truth in its most abstract form, it will clearly result that to produce, in one and the same work, good metaphysics and delightful poetry, is a matter of extreme difficulty. This difficulty Tennyson has signally vanquished in The Two Voices. It is a compact, closely-reasoned metaphysical essay on the worth of life and the hope of immortality, and yet I know no poem of Tennyson's more variegated in colour, more piquantly and brilliantly picturesque, more truly though gravely melodious.

The first of the Voices opens the dialogue with a recommendation to the poet to commit suicide.

A still small voice spake unto me,
"Thou art so full of misery,

Were it not better not to be ? "

The poet replies that he will not destroy what is so wonderfully made. The Voice rejoins that the shuffling off of this mortal coil may open to him new spheres of energy and happiness :

To-day I saw the dragon-fly

Come from the wells where he did lie.

An inner impulse rent the veil

Of his old husk; from head to tail

Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

He dried his wings: like gauze they grew:
Through crofts and pastures wet with dew,
A living flash of light he flew.

The reply of the poet is that man is nature's highest product-the obvious suggestion being that there is no splendid dragon-fly into which the human grub, released by death, is likely to develop. The Voice answers

that he is blinded with his pride, that in a boundless universe is "boundless better, boundless worse." As for destroying so fine a piece of work as a man, there would be "plenty of the kind," although he made an end of himself. Then did my response clearer fall;

"No compound of this earthly ball
Is like another, all in all.”

This is undeniable, and the Voice vainly seeks to parry the thrust by jeering at the unimportance of his "peculiar difference" in the sum of things. Now, however, it tries a new tack, and argues that the poet's wretchedness makes him unfit for anything but complaining—

"Thine anguish will not let thee sleep,

Nor any train of reason keep;

Thou canst not think, but thou wilt weep."

The poet declines to shut his life from happier chance. "All the years invent." Every month is enriched with

some new development.

Were this not well, to bide mine hour,

Tho' watching from a ruin'd tower

How grows the day of human power?

The Voice retorts that truth is unattainable. He may scale the mountain, but the sacred morning will still gleam above his head.

"Forerun thy peers, thy time and let

Thy feet, millenniums hence, be set
In midst of knowledge, dream'd not yet.

"Thou hast not gain'd a real height,
Nor art thou nearer to the light,

Because the scale is infinite."

Instead of replying, as I think he might have replied, that the finite mind does not require to grasp the infinitude of truth, but only to go forward from light to light,*

* My readers will join with me in thanking the writer of the following letter:

Berlin, S.W., November 10, 1878. I have just been enjoying your critical examination of The Two Voices, and re-enjoying the poem itself afterwards. I write because I wish to call your

the poet evades the difficulty, and takes another line of defence.

I said, "When I am gone away,

'He dared not tarry,' men will say,

Doing dishonour to my clay."

The Voice sees its advantage, and attacks him sharply :

"This is more vile," he made reply,

"To breathe and loathe, to live and sigh,

Than once from dread of pain to die.

Repulsed here, the poet falls back upon the more hopeful aspects of life, tries to awaken within himself a glow of sympathy with human effort, and recalls the time when he anticipated a life of work and a death of honour.

"In some good cause, not in mine own,
To perish, wept for, honour'd, known,
And like a warrior overthrown:

"Whose eyes are dim with glorious tears,
When, soil'd with noble dust, he hears

His country's war-song thrill his ears:

attention to a passage in Wordsworth's Prelude to the Excursion, in which he goes farther than you do in your suggestion of an answer to Tennyson's unanswered, and, therefore, as one is led to suppose, almost agreed with Tempter, when he dwells upon the impossibility of the finite ever attaining to an infinite knowledge of truth, and, therefore, upon the uselessness and the misery of trying to press onwards and upwards. The contrast between the way in which the same thought had affected the two poets struck me strongly years ago, when, with Tennyson's Two Voices enshrined in my heart as a most precious possession, I was reading Wordsworth's Prelude. It was a contrast most fruitful of thought. As perhaps you may not have noticed it, I send you Wordsworth's lines, thinking that when your valuable papers are gathered into a book you may be glad to use them. I am sorry I have forgotten exactly in which part of the Prelude they occur, but I believe it was towards the commencement. MARY MACK WALL.

"And deem not profitless those fleeting moods

Of shadowy exaltation: not for this
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life: but that the soul

Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue."

Wordsworth's Prelude.

"Then dying of a mortal stroke,

What time the foeman's line is broke,

And all the war is roll'd in smoke."

This, says the Voice, was the stirring of the young blood, -good enough for the moment, but mere illusion. Recurring to the previously urged plea that man cannot read the riddle of the earth or grasp any truth related to the mind, it reiterates its first advice.

"Cease to wail and brawl! Why inch by inch to darkness crawl? There is one remedy for all."

The poet is now stung to anger.

“O dull, one-sided Voice,” said I,
"Wilt thou make everything a lie,
To flatter me that I may die?”

He refers to the noble lives that have been lived, and maintains that, though the atmosphere of the world is darkened with dust of systems and of creeds, some have achieved calm, and known "the joy that mixes man with heaven." Here occurs that picture of the martyr Stephen which is in Tennyson's loftiest manner.

"He heeded not reviling tones,

Nor sold his heart to idle moans,

Tho' curs'd and scorn'd, and bruised with stones :

"But looking upward, full of grace,

He pray'd, and from a happy place

God's glory smote him on the face."

The Voice answers, sullenly, that there were no real grounds of hope in Stephen's case, but that "the elements were kindlier mixed," the circumstances were more than ordinarily fitted to produce illusion.

The poet now suggests that, if he goes hence in quest of truth, he may merely exchange one riddle for a hundred, and that his anguish, " unmanacled from bonds of sense," may become permanent. On this, the Voice, reversing its original argument in favour of suicide, namely, that it might be the door to a life of more splendid activity, tempts

him with the prospect of eternal rest in death. Such inconsistency of argument is admirably in keeping with the character of a tempter.

"Consider well," the Voice replied,

"His face, that two hours since hath died;
Wilt thou find passion, pain, or pride?

"Will he obey when one commands ?
Or answer should one press his hands?
He answers not, nor understands.

"His palms are folded on his breast :
There is no other thing expressed
But long disquiet merged in rest.”

In several stanzas, equally beautiful and impressive with these or more so, the Voice argues that death makes an end of a man. The poet calls up his whole strength to reply. If all is dark, he begins, how are we to know that the dead are dead? Why, since the victory of death seems so complete, does any one cherish a doubt upon the subject? "The simple senses crown'd his head : 'Omega! thou art Lord,' they said, 'We find no motion in the dead.'

“Why, if man rot in dreamless ease,
Should that plain fact, as taught by these,
Not make him sure that he shall cease?

"Who forged that other influence,
That heat of inward evidence,

By which he doubts against the sense?"

Here, at last, the poet has opened fire from his main battery. This is one of the grand arguments on which the advocate of immortality takes his stand. It is an argument pre-eminently accordant with modern science and modern philosophy, for no one can urge it with clearer logic than the evolutionist. Why is it proper for the bird to fly and for the reptile to crawl? Because, says the evolutionist, the bird has developed wings. In like manner, the human creature has developed a faith in immortality, or, to put it at the lowest, a hope of immortality. Here and there a few persons, by elaborately educating themselves in the