sea. If the personality of the Spirit, God, and of the spirit, man, is distinctly posited, as in these lines, then the vague lines previously quoted, and many others that sound pantheistically in the piece, may possibly be capable of an interpretation consistent with spiritual theism. Entirely in harmony with this conclusion are the two brief but noble poems, Wages and Will. The thesis, or rather the reverent suggestion, of the first is that God, having revealed Himself to us—having taken us into His service in the universal battle of light against darknesswould act with strange and cruel unfairness if He extinguished finally the aspirations and energies He has awakened. The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust, Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly? She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky : Give her the wages of going on, and not to die. Since Milton penned his sonnets, the grandeur of spiritual manhood, the majesty of moral strength, have not found statelier expression than in Tennyson's lines on Will. By this term he means the sovereign faculty by which man decides for the right; and he describes the inexpugnable fortitude, the Divine peace, of the man who maintains it in its legitimate authority. O well for him whose will is strong! He suffers, but he will not suffer long; He will not suffer long, because, as his pain can be but physical, there is an obvious term to it, either through restoration to health or death. He cannot suffer wrong: for not the smallest particle of suffering can reach him, shielded as he is by the proudly placid consciousness that injustice, in relation to him on whom it is inflicted, is, strictly estimated, nothing at all. Brand him, lash him, crucify him; he pities you, not himself. But ill for him who, bettering not with time, Recurring and suggesting still! How shrewdly practical, how penetrating and priceless, is moralising like this! The merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. No reader, I trust, will imagine that, because I have not touched upon many of Tennyson's poems, I overlook or underrate them. The poems descriptive of the Lincolnshire Farmer, old style and new style, attest immense dramatic power, and run over with broad and racy humour. The Princess is admirable as a serio-comic poem, and contains some of the finest songs ever penned. The poetry connected, directly or indirectly, with his position as Laureate is unequal, but it is incomparably superior to any poetry of its class. The Gardener's Daughter, Tithonus, Lucretius, are all, in their widely-varying manners, excellent. The "wicked broth" that killed Lucretius has been thought superbly imaginative; but it has always, I confess, suggested to my mind unprincipled plum-pudding. Take him for all in all, Tennyson must, I think, be pronounced the greatest poet of his time. Victor Hugo is indeed a colossal genius, wider in his range than Tennyson, who has not succeeded in the acting drama, but his touch is too panoramic for poetic art of the highest order, and Browning, though he has power of intellect and imagination sufficient for ten poets, is far from Tennyson's equal in literary form. A CHAPTER I. HIS POEMS. FTER the great artist, the great critic. For half a century before John Ruskin was born (February, 1819), the art which delineates nature's beauty, whether with pen or with pencil, had been gloriously at work in Great Britain. Cowper and Burns had leaped back to nature, flinging from them, by the mere expanding energy of their manhood and genius, the traditions of the artificial schools, whose intellectual sovereign is Pope; and so sweet and strange and enchanting was the charm which nature lent them, that poets and painters hastened to follow their example. Scott, in simple boy-like enjoyment of morning clouds and breezy hills, of sward begemmed with dewdrops and torrents flashing in keen lightnings down the gorge; Byron, with less depth and sincerity of love for nature than Scott, but a more fiery and imaginative sympathy for her sterner aspects and moods, for the throbbing of the earthquake and the answering of mountain to mountain in the thunderstorm; Keats, with a town-bred boy's ecstasy, almost sickly in its yearning intensity, over every glimpse of green leafage "sprouting a tender boon for nibbling sheep;' Wordsworth, looking upon himself as a poet-seer, hierophant of the sacredness and the mystery of nature, watching the shadow of the daisy on the stone, and listening to the syllables of the brook in the wood; Shelley, exulting in the beauty of the world and casting over it the light of a loftier |