estate from generation to generation, they are members of society, and fathers of families; they have a numerous offspring, small poets of the same order spring about them like suckers from a tree; they are welded into the social order. The others may be men of not inferior genius; but they stand apart, like barren younger brothers; they are solitary; it is themselves they express, and no more; they may have occasional imitators, but they are neither the founders of schools, nor in them does any school find its culmination; they do not "look before and after." They are connected with their own times, of course, but only at single points. The first are waves, part and parcel of the great river of life rolling with it to the sea; these rather are inlets, where the water whirls round while the main current rushes past. The one set are the hierarchs of the Established Catholic Church of poesy, the others are leaders among the Dissenters. To take a few familiar examples, Chaucer, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cowley, Pope, Byron, are of the legitimate line; Spenser, Ben Jonson, Milton, Swift, Crabbe, are irregulars, and never has the contrast been more marked than in our own day, between Tennyson and Wordsworth.

Tennyson is the most modern of poets, that is, of great poets, and in the broad and permanent aspects of what constitutes us modern. Lesser poets may represent more vividly the transient phases, the accidents of the passing time; but it is Tennyson who gives us back the true characteristics in small as well as in great matters. His air is modern. He dispenses with the old formalities thought necessary to poetry. He has cast the ancient costume. His dress is to the old forms what a wide-awake and easy morning coat is to a wig and claret velvet suit, or the high hat and tight pantaloons of the Regency. He has the free insouciant demeanour characteristic of modern society; but of English society,-never American. His Muse, if she met you and liked you, would drop the Mr. from your name after ten minutes' conversation. She would cut the "right honourable " off her addresses to peers, and ignore the existence of the monosyllable, " sir." Tennyson goes to his object without preface and circumstantial delay. He does not think it necessary to tell you he is going to say a thing before he says it. You must find out his " Standpunkt" for yourself. And the publishing details are in accordance with this stage of development. His books are undefaced with introductions or annotations; he cuts down a dedication to the very shortest limits, and deems the kind , and courteous reader an extinct animal. In what may be called colloquial poetry he stands alone for ease and harmony,

though leaning sometimes to affectation and mannerism of expression. We quote the beginning of "The Epic" to remind our readers of this sort of style; but it is abundant all through the first volume in such poems as "Dora," " Audley Court," "Edwin Morris," "Walking to the Mail;" nowhere so easy and so harmonious as in "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," and nowhere so graceful as in the charming poem of the "Talking Oak."

At Francis Allen's on the Christmas-eve,

The game of forfeits done-the girls all kiss'd
Beneath the sacred bush and past away-
The parson Holmes, the poet Everard Hall,
The host, and I sat round the wassail-bowl,
Then half-way ebb'd: and there we held a talk,
How all the old honour had from Christmas gone,
Or gone, or dwindled down to some odd games
In some odd nooks like this; till I, tired out
With cutting eights that day upon the pond,
Where, three times slipping from the outer edge,
I bump'd the ice into three several stars,
Fell in a doze; and half-awake I heard
The parson taking wide and wider sweeps,
Now harping on the church-commissioners,
Now hawking at Geology and schism;
Until I woke, and found him settled down
Upon the general decay of faith

Right thro' the world, at home was little left,
And none abroad: there was no anchor, none,
To hold by.' Francis, laughing, clapt his hand
On Everard's shoulder, with 'I hold by him.'
'And I,' quoth Everard, by the wassail-bowl.'
'Why yes,' I said, 'we knew your gift that way
At College: but another which you had,

I mean of verse (for so we held it then,)

What came of that?' 'You know,' said Frank, 'he burnt
His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books'—
And then to me demanding why? Oh, sir,
He thought that nothing new was said, or else
Something so said 'twas nothing that a truth
Looks freshest in the fashion of the day:
God knows he has a mint of reasons: ask,
It pleased me well enough.' Nay, nay,' said Hall,
'Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any man
Remodel models? these twelve books of mine
Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth.
Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt.' 'But I,'

Said Francis, pick'd the eleventh from this hearth,
And have it keep a thing, its use will come.
I hoard it as a sugar-plum for Holmes.'
He laugh'd, and I, though sleepy, like a horse
That hears the corn-bin open, prick'd my ears:
For I remember'd Everard's college fame
When we were Freshmen: then at my request
He brought it and the poet little urged,
But with some prelude of disparagement,
Read, mouthing out his hollow oes and aes,
Deep-chested music, and to this result."

Whatever we may have to say on Mr. Tennyson's "Maud," he is still master of this art, as will be seen by the following extract from one of the poems in his new volume.

66

So Lawrence Aylmer, seated on a stile

In the long hedge, and rolling in his mind
Old waifs of rhyme, and bowing o'er the brook
A tonsured head in middle age forlorn,

Mused, and was mute. On a sudden a low breath
Of tender air made tremble in the hedge
The fragil bindweed-bells and bryony rings;
And he look'd up. There stood a maiden near,
Waiting to pass. In much amaze he stared
On eyes a bashful azure, and on hair

In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell
Divides threefold to show the fruit within:

Then, wondering, ask'd her 'Are you from the farm?'
"Yes," answer'd she. Pray stay a little pardon me,
What do they call you?' Katie.' That were strange.
What surname ?' Willows.' 'No!' That is my name.'
'Indeed!' and here he look'd so self-perplext,
That Katie laugh'd, and laughing blush'd, till he
Laugh'd also, but as one before he wakes,
Who feels a glimmering strangeness in his dream.
Then looking at her; Too happy, fresh and fair,
Too fresh and fair in our sad world's best bloom,
To be the ghost of one who bore your name
About these meadows, twenty years ago.'

"Have you not heard?' said Katie, we came back. We bought the farm we tenanted before.

Am I so like her? so they said on board.

Sir, if you knew her in her English days,

My mother, as it seems you did, the days

That most she loves to talk of, come with me.

My brother James is in the harvest-field:

But she-you will be welcome-O, come in!'"

And Tennyson does more than excel in colloquial poetry.

His style throughout is new, entirely different from anything the world has seen before, and exactly adapted to the day. Wordsworth insisted on an every-day poetic vocabulary. Tennyson introduced a modern poetic phraseology.

Nor is his matter less impregnated with the dominant feelings of his time. He sympathises with the modern bent of thought. He is touched with the triumphant, somewhat boastful temper, of an age of physical discovery. He exults in endless development. He tells us

"The thoughts of men are widen'd in
The process of the suns."

In this century men really have won new ground in one direction. They have enlarged the play of thought in the domain of science, and a fresh and rapid advance has given a forward attitude to our hopes and our philosophy. Tennyson is deeply tinged with this feeling. He lives to look onward over vast prospects of future time, and to imagine the heavenly order growing more clear and perfect. He leans upon the future; the "Eternal process, moving on;" he would fain

"Take wings of foresight. Lighten through
The secular abyss to come."

Moreover he subdues the results to his uses; has made science subservient to poetry, and is perhaps the only man who has done so. Not his, the "Lives of the Steam Engine" or the "Chemical Affinities in Verse;" but his genius has boldly availed itself of new scientific ideas, just as they became sufficiently familiar to make them adequate illustrations and expressions of his meaning. Take as a single instance the fifty-fourth poem in the "In Memoriam," familiar to all from its beauty, and the fifty-fifth, of which we quote enough to show how he is pursuing the idea through a suggestion derived from geological discovery.

"The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave;
Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

"Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

A

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"That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear;
"I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God;

"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope."

"So careful of the type?' but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries a thousand types are gone :

I care for nothing, all shall go.

More than all this, when he has shared, sympathised with, used the scientific leaning of modern thought, he can share too in the fears it excites; can express the dangers it holds in its hands, can warn it against the pride of independence.

"Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix

With men and prosper! Who shall fix

Her pillars? Let her work prevail.

"" But on her forehead sits a fire;

She sets her forward countenance
And leaps into the future chance,
Submitting all things to desire.

"Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain

She cannot fight the fear of death.
What is she, cut from love and faith,
But some wild Pallas from the brain

"Of Demons ? fiery-hot to burst

All barriers in her onward race

For power. Let her know her place;
She is the second, not the first."

There is another range of present characteristics more important than these, and with which Tennyson's poetry is proportionally deeply occupied. It is he who, more than any