The good old fellow who runs on with garrulous näivete over the walnuts and the wine seems to have done little or nothing all his life but look into his wife's eyes. The limitation of Tennyson's sympathy with action in the period of the first efflorescence of his genius is very remarkable. But when we glance along his works as a whole we perceive that he, least of all men, can be accused of having eulogized marriage as a state of sweetly sordid rest. The main theme of his most extensive poem is the marriage relationship, exhibited in the persons of a king and queen, and viewed as the centre and crown of the beneficent influences that act upon society. Had the marriage of Arthur been all that the king and his poet deemed it capable of being, Arthur would have found the influence of Guinevere not only a stay, but an impulse and inspiration in his kingliest enterprises. The scheme was baffled; but its being baffled is the tragic burden and issue of the poem; nor is it easy to imagine Tennyson or any other poet conveying an impression of the positive and aggressive energy for good of such marriage. as Arthur's and Guinevere's might have been, so strong as the reader now derives from the collapse of the king's hopes and the defeat of his life-purpose, and from Guinevere's cry of passionate despair

Ah, my God,

What might I not have made of Thy fair world,
Had I but loved Thy highest creature here!

It is, in fact, to be noted that The Miller's Daughter is almost the only poem in which Tennyson sets married life in a wholly prosperous and happy light. The Lord of Burleigh disguises himself as a landscape-painter, marries a village maiden, and is a gentle and joyous husband; but the lady sinks into her grave under the burden of an honor unto which she was not born. In Lady Clare it is a single incident in the course of Lord Ronald's and his bride's true love that furnishes the subject of the poem. The perfect trust and perfect constancy

of a woman's heart are its theme; but, though the reader sees in long perspective the happy wedded life of Lord Ronald and his low-born wife, he actually hears only of their espousals. In Locksley Hall, in Maud, in Aylmer's Field, and in that Arthurian Epic which gathers itself together out of many idyls, love becomes, through worldliness, pride, or faithlessness, the source of sorrow.

It is, I fancy, to Locksley Hall, more than to any other of his poems, that Tennyson owes his hold upon the heart of the world. Partly this may be due to its being a peculiarly fascinating and piquant variation from his usual manner. It is trochaic in melody, the beat coming upon the first syllable in the metrical foot, instead of, as in the iambus, on the second.

Comrades, leave me here a little while, as yet 'tis early morn;
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn.

The corresponding iambic measure, in which the beat falls upon the second syllable, is exhibited in Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.

Then Ocnus of Falerii, rushed on the Roman three,
And Lausulus of Urgo, the rover of the sea.

Tennyson generally uses the iambus. This is, indeed, the organic unit of measurement in English verse, forming the basis of the heroic stanza, rhymed and unrhymed, as employed in all the monumental works of English poetry, the Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, Pope's Essays and Satires, Dryden's Fables, the Shakspearian drama, the Faëry Queen, the Revolt of Islam, the Excursion, Don Juan, and Childe Harold. So long ago as the days of Aristotle the iambic measure was considered “the natural march-music of action and business." It is most consistent with the genius of the English tongue, and Tennyson has evidently found it harmonize best with that patient elaboration, that minute and symmetrical working-up of the pictures

of his mind, in which he delights. In Locksley Hall, however, he gives voice to one of those high tides of emotion in which the full heart sometimes relieves itself, and on such an occasion it was more important to render the force and billowy splendor of the waves, to express sympathy with their glorious freedom, their magnificent boldness, and wildness, and tumult, their clapping of hands and revelry of infinite laughter, or passionate sobbing of grief, than to mould their particular forms or to time their march upon the beach. In Locksley Hall, therefore, as under somewhat different conditions in Maud, Tennyson escapes from that iambic regularity, that dignified perfection and repose, so characteristic of his general manner, into the fitful and ringing, or wildly wailing and throbbing, melody of a trochaic measure. Rich as is the color of the poem, there is a racy picturesqueness in it from first to last-a picturesqueness of soldier-life and vagrant comradeship, of windy hillocks by the sea, and morning copses and bugle-horns.

The soldier tells, or rather chants, his own history, of which the key-note is his unhappy love, moving at once with superb energy of soldier-like purpose into the heart of the tale, bringing the past before us with all the vividness of the present. In two lines he dismisses his comrades, and makes for himself a solitude; in four more, of as masterly breadth and precision of landscape painting as could be paralleled in the language, he sets before us the scene of the occurrences that are to form the main subject of the poem.

'Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland, flying over Locksley Hall;
Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Then follows that description of the youth of an aspiring, gifted, ardent boy of the nineteenth century, which has been familiar as household words upon the lips of all readers of

English poetry for something like forty years. We of the last quarter of the nineteenth century cannot, as I hinted before, without a strong imaginative effort, recall the enthusiasm of eager hope with which, in its second quarter, people still looked into the future and saw the commercial, scientific, and political "vision of the world." The "fairy tales of science" have now rather lost their charm for those who, causelessly or with good cause, charge our prominent scientific authorities with wishing to chain up or to petrify the soul of man in universal materialism. "The promise" that the future "closed" for the youthful singer of Locksley Hall has turned out to be a dreadfully prosaic future of iron roads, towns choked with soot, rivers poisoned with chemicals, nations taxed to the bone for iron-clads, groaning, as in the hopeless anguish of a torturing dream, under nightmare armies. The "argosies of magic sails" have, with lamentable frequency, carried cargoes of shoddy. "The parliament of man, the federation of the world," has not yet come; but the Parliament of the United Kingdom has been repeatedly reformed; and yet it is not found that "the common-sense of most" holds the gallant Major O'Gorman in awe, or prevents Mr. Roebuck from announcing with exultation that "Benjamin Disraeli rules the world."

From visions of the future, however, as well as from vague glancings at Orion and the Pleiades, our soldier-bard is suddenly recalled to a personal, present, and transcendent interest. A few brief, living touches place his Amy before us, and, though we are furnished with almost no details of his lovemaking, yet so vivid and so suggestive are those few that are given so effectually do they awake our own imagination and set it to work-that we seem to have been present at ever so many delightful wanderings amidst the copses dewy with dawn, and to have again and again, with the lovers, watched the sun reddening the evening wave. He told his love; then

On her pallid cheek and forehead came a color and a light,
As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.
And she turn'd-her bosom heaving with a sudden storm of sighs-
All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes-

Saying, "I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong;"
Saying, "Dost thou love me, cousin ?" weeping, "I have loved thee long."
Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

This last line concentrates into itself a large part of Tennyson's noble conception of love, or conception of the nobleness of love. Love annihilates Self, even while exalting it, and crowns life in a twofold ecstasy of renunciation and attainment. A life of unselfish, beneficent occupation-of sympathy in mental culture-of co-operation in benevolent effort-would have been the natural sequel. But Mammon and conventional respectability tore the strings from the harp of Life, and shattered the glass of Time with its golden sands. "Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue," Amy jilts her soldier laddie; and the latter has no better consolation than to pour out anathemas upon paternal worldliness, to describe the misery of a forced and loveless marriage, to inveigh, not without bitterness, against the girl, and to rush out into the melancholy yet stimulating activities of life. Exception has been taken to the tone which the discarded lover assumes toward her who has forsaken him, as if its harshness were impossible for a generous and magnanimous nature, which Tennyson, without question, intends his lover to be. But I think this is to bring the air of Rosa Matilda romance over the world of reality. It would have been very pretty for the poet to represent his lover as breathing nothing but admiration and. broken-hearted forgiveness. Schiller might perhaps have told the story so; but Goethe or Shakspeare would not. Heroes that are too angelic cease to be men. Too high-flown mag