These are the two broad conditions of immediate acceptance. Those who, like Shelley, have a world of their own, crossing and mingling in perplexed lines with the world by which they are surrounded, must, for the most part, wait for that to pass entirely away before they can attain to a just appreciation. Tennyson belongs to the first class. His is a mind in exact harmony with the times in which he lives. Such minds spring up every generation or so in the history of a national literature. It is not always easy to trace their antecedents, and yet it is they who lead down the regular line of poetical development. The whole race of poets might be classed in two divisions, according to their unison with, or independence of, the age in which they flourish. The one form a set of successional links in a chain, they are the legitimate children of the times which produced them, they are elder sons, they have the family 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; the others 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 wideawake 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." "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. This sort of style is abundant all through Mr. Tennyson's 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.” 99 66 66 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. "So Lawrence Aylmer, seated on a stile Mused, and was mute. On a sudden a low breath In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell Who feels a glimmering strangeness in his dream. 'Have you not heard?' said Katie, 'we came back. My mother, as it seems you did, the days That most she loves to talk of, come with me. And Tennyson does more than excel in colloquial poetry. His style throughout is new, entirely different from any thing 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 that "The thoughts of men are widen'd with 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 loves to look onward oyer 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; he 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; The likest God within the soul? Are God and Nature then at strife, That I, considering everywhere I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares And faintly trust the larger hope." "So careful of the type?' but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone I care for nothing, all shall go." More than all this, when he has shared, sympathised with, used the scientific learning 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 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 Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain- |