tifully on a broomstick; but even a broomstick, if one were permitted to wander in thought to the woods in which it grew, might seem a likelier subject for poetry than the pecuniary loss of a city clerk, on which Tennyson has contrived to hang a powerful and beautiful poem in Sea Dreams. A city clerk is the hero, his wife, an unknown artist's orphan child, is the heroine; their child Margaret is the personage of next importance in the story; and the list of characters is completed by a speculator in mines, whose representations had induced the clerk to risk his money.

One babe was theirs, a Margaret, three years old:
They, thinking that her clear germander eye
Droopt in the giant-factoried city-gloom,

Came, with a month's leave given them, to the sea.

The "germander" eye! Some might call this a touch of pre-Raphaelite conceit or affectation, but I think a poet has a right to invent color-words for himself when he wants them, provided only that they are expressive, picturesque, and not too far-fetched. There is no word in the language that will define the particular tint of blue which you see not unfrequently in the eye of an ailing child so well as that which is here applied by Tennyson. It is the faintly mottled blue of the germander speedwell-nothing else. As the little flower can be seen in summer in every English lane, the reference to it can hardly be called far-fetched.

Reaching the sea-coast, "all sand and cliff, and deep-in-running cave," on a Saturday, the clerk and his wife went to chapel next morning, and, after sermon,

Forth they came and paced the shore,

Ran in and out the long sea-framing caves,
Drank the large air, and saw, but scarce believed

(The sootflake of so many a summer still

Clung to their fancies) that they saw, the sea.

So now on sand they walk'd, and now on cliff,
Lingering about the thymy promontories,

Till all the sails were darken'd in the west,
And rosed in the east.

There is another reading, fresh and bright, from nature's own page! You stand by the sea, on a southward-looking coast, as the sun goes down. Westward, where the sails come between you and the sunset, they show simply as spots of shade; eastward, where they are farther from the sun than you, they catch the gleam from the west, and every sail is a speck of rose-light. I call that a proper illustration of what the versifier says of our Alfred's "truth of touch."

After these experiences, the pair went "homeward and to bed." The wife, who in her Christian tenderness was stronger than her husband, urges him to forgive the man whose "unctuous mouth" had lured him to buy the Peruvian mine shares, and lose the savings of twelve long years. He replies:

"Forgive! How many will say, 'forgive,' and find

A sort of absolution in the sound

To hate a little longer! No; the sin

That neither God nor man can well forgive,
Hypocrisy, I saw it in him at once."

He gives his wife an account of his last meeting with the man who had injured him.

"My dearest friend,

Have faith, have faith!

We live by faith,' said he;

And all things work together for the good

Of those-it makes me sick to quote him-last

Gript my hand hard, and with ‘God-bless-you' went.

I stood like one that had received a blow.

I found a hard friend in his loose accounts,
A loose one in the hard grip of his hand,
A curse in his God-bless-you: then my eyes
Pursued him down the street, and far away,
Amongst the honest shoulders of the crowd,
Read rascal in the motions of his back,
And scoundrel in the supple-sliding knee."

Still the woman pleads. She will not grant that the roguery has been made out, and even if the deception were shown to have been wilful, she would bespeak forgiveness. If he wrongs his friend, he “wrongs himself more," and in "the silent court of justice in his breast," in which he is both judge and jury, he will be condemned. Perhaps, after all, he meant well. The husband remains unconvinced. In that silent court of hers, a man may, he says, be counsel for himself, and then he quotes what he calls an "old satire," but which really is a masterly imitation by Tennyson of our old English satiric style. I am not sure whether it was Dryden or Cowper that he had in view, and I cannot help thinking that he must have been influenced, in composing the lines, by Crabbe. The first line will recall Dryden's "With two left legs and Judas-colored hair."

"With all his conscience and one eye askew,
So false, he partly took himself for true;
Whose pious talk, when most his heart was dry,
Made wet the crafty crowsfoot round his eye;
Who, never naming God except for gain,
So never took that useful name in vain.
Made Him his catspaw and the Cross his tool,
And Christ the bait to trap his dupe and fool;
Nor deeds of gift, but gifts of grace he forged,
And snake-like slimed his victim ere he gorged;
And oft at Bible meetings, o'er the rest

Arising, did his holy oily best,

Dropping the too rough H in Hell and Heaven,

To spread the Word by which himself had thriven."

He asks his wife how she likes this.

Her answer honors

Tennyson, and is, by implication, one of the noblest tributes ever paid to the heart-wisdom of woman.

"Nay," she said,

"I loathe it; he had never kindly heart,

Nor ever cared to better his own kind,

Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it."

It is impossible for me to quote the dreams, one dreamed by the clerk, the other by his wife, to which the poem owes its name, and apart from which it might seem an ethically sugges tive but somewhat prosaic performance. In one of them-the husband's the results of speculation are poetically contrasted with those of honest work; in the other-the wife's-there seems to be an imaginative shadowing forth of the general revolutionary movement of these times, and of the battle of Churches and Sects, of creeds and scepticisms, through all which—an echo, shall I say? of the indestructible harmony in her own heart-she hears a note of Divine music. Readers will find much food for musing in these dreams. But we have not quite done with the narrative part of the poem. The wife has seen some one from the town, and has news "later by an hour" than her husband's. She speaks:

"We must forgive the dead."

"Dead! who is dead?"

"The man your eye pursued.

A little after you had parted with him,

He suddenly dropt dead of heart-disease."

"Dead? he? of heart-disease? what heart had he

To die of? dead!"

"Ah, dearest, if there be

A devil in man, there is an angel too,

And if he did that wrong you charge him with,
His angel broke his heart."

The woman has her triumph. "I do forgive him," says the husband. There is not a nobler heroine in literature than this wife of a city clerk, and I see no reason to believe that there are not many such to be found in London.

In Enoch Arden, Tennyson deals with a subject which might have had charms for Crabbe, but Crabbe would have loaded the shadows too much; in Tennyson's handling the poem is sad but not painful. The hero, Enoch Arden, is beyond rivalry

the principal personage in the tale, and his heroism is at once of the loftiest and simplest order. He is an unlucky man, but invincible his brain is ordinary; morally he is sublime. His duty, however hard it may be, is always clear to him; and, without any consciousness that he is acting heroically, he always proves equal to it. Harder duty, however, has seldom fallen to any man than his.

Enoch Arden, a rough sailor's lad, Philip Ray, the miller's only son, and pretty Annie Lee, played together as children beneath the cliffs that faced the breakers, on the beach of a small seaport town

Play'd

Among the waste and lumber of the shore,
Hard coils of cordage, swarthy fishing-nets,
Anchors of rusty fluke, and boats updrawn.

The literal accuracy of these lines is almost comical. Go to Deal and you will see precisely such a shore. Enoch and Philip both love Annie, and the three play at keeping house in a cave which runs in below the cliff. Annie was willing enough to be "little wife to both," but at heart loved Enoch best. He was at first successful; prospered in his fishing, made himself full sailor on board a merchantman, and before he was twenty-one, purchased a boat, and married her. First a daughter, then a son, were born to them, and all things continued to go well with Enoch until he fell from a mast and broke a limb. While he lay recovering, a third son, a sickly one, was Meanwhile, some one stepped in and snatched away his

born. trade:

And on him fell,

Altho' a grave and staid God-fearing man,
Yet lying thus inactive, doubt and gloom.
He seem'd as in a nightmare of the night,
To see his children leading evermore
Low, miserable lives of hand-to-mouth,
And her he loved, a beggar: then he pray'd,
"Save them from this, whatever comes to me."