back, might prefer, alas! to see thou Cockney pretender!" we what fun was going on out of should say; "thou hop 'o my doors rather than to examine the thumb! thou frog that wouldst store of publications which occupy swell into the semblance of the our thoughts within: so we shall lordly master of the meadows! go on soberly with our own work, go hang a calf's skin on thy as befits a faithful servant of the recreant limbs!" And so did public, hoping for many months to our predecessors before us. Α come to help the judgment and great glamour was in their eyes, develop the natural good taste of blinding them to the inevitable our respected masters, and summon certainty that one generation no spirits out of their repose. passes away and another comes. There was nothing said about "School-miss Alfred," we recollect with a shudder. But what then? There are few so high-minded, few so enlightened, but would have done the same. And time has brought its revenges. To us, who now fill their places, it is Tennyson who is the monarch, and the youngsters his juniors are impertinent, as he once appeared. We are very sure that the slim volume which we have here from the poet's hands is the one to which those critics would have first turned; and there is, we will not deny, a certain humorous satisfaction in discussing 'Locksley Hall' in presence of the effigies of those whose "Lay of the Lovelorn " can never be dissociated from that fine work. It is, we believe, understood as one of the qualities of a great poem, that it should lend itself seductively to the uses of parody. Never, perhaps, was there such a parody as that of Bon Gaultier. We are half ashamed to confess that the version of the mischievous imitator so lingers in our ear, that without thought we cannot identify which is which.

We know, however, among the books before us, which the old critics of Maga would select by instinct for the first word. We are afraid they were not very genial to the first appearance of the great poet of our day. He was not a poet of their day. Theirs was an age of giants, and the young aspirant who came in with a new dawn after the glory of such a blaze of prime as that which shown upon Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Shelley, Keats, not to speak of our own ever beloved and supreme Magician of the North: is apt to look like a little unnecessary pretender an upstart and interloper seeking to oust the true monarchs from their thrones-or at least to replace them, which is quite as offensive to the worshipper. We have our doubts whether even we, impartial and unbiased as we know ourselves to be, would not be animated by something of this feeling towards any little young man of twenty or so who should appear with a couple of volumes under his arm, and the manifest intention of taking the noble peer of Haslemere and Freshwater by the beard. "Begone

"I hold the grey barbarian lower than the Christian"

-which is it? and is it Tennyson We protest we are quite unable to or Bon Gaultier who talks of wor- reply. Let not Lord Tennyson shipping Mighty Mumbo-Jumbo chafe at the disrespect, for there in the Mountains of the Moon ?" is none intended. The laughter

66

has no bitter meaning in it. The fulfilled.
ridicule means admiration as true,
perhaps more real and sincere
than the gush of effusive worship
which is one of the least whole-
some attendants of a great poet's
undisputed reign.

Sixty years after ! 1 A long life is, thank heaven, no rare thing among the immortals: but it is not often that they bring us in baskets of gold and silver the ripened fruit of their musings, as this little volume professedly does. Wordsworth, the last old man of that high race, put forth instead, the tender chronicle of his early years, the Prelude to existence, with its revelations of the poetic child, and pictures of the schoolboy and the youth, as he approached the other limit of his life. Perhaps it was on the whole a better inspiration. When Tennyson (he must pardon us, the offensive prefix of that new lordships is too much for our patience) returns in his old age to the strain of his beginning, it is not so much of the tender grace of the day that is dead that he thinks, as of the languor of the present and the disappointments of the past. Nothing can be more benign and delightful than the aspect of an old man turning back, with the mellow light of experience in his eyes with half a smile over all those sincerest transports of mis-. ery and rapture through which he has passed, and half a sigh over the high expectations which, at their best, are never more than half

He knows that nothing

is so good, yet nothing so bad, as
he once thought; and that if his
efforts may have been less fruitful
than he hoped, yet in the hand of
God lies all his works, and that
in everything there is something
which shows the trace of the
divine. This matured and high
philosophy, the lesson of long con-
tinuance, the best encouragement
to trust and patience, which may
be read in the dim eyes of many
a voiceless old grandfather, mak-
ing his poor shred of humanity
a noble thing, is not the lesson
which the old poet teaches. The
burden on his lips is failure. Once
he hoped, but hopes no more.
Once in that buoyancy of inspi-
ration with which youth springs
out of its painful heartbreaks and
despairs, he had cried Forward!
hoping all things from the fairy
tales of science and the long re-
sults of time. But sixty years
have passed and these wonders
are "staled by frequence, shrunk
by usage," and have not accom-
plished their promise.
That great
impulse has produced-what?
Nothing! More misery in our
streets, more vice in our blood.
He bids his grandson, who is now
the heir of all things, who is suf-
fering as he did from a false love,
to adopt another rule. To do his
best, hoping for little, is all he
can suggest to the new hero.
Not to think that he can change
the face of things, yet not to
cease hoping that "Love will con-
quer at the last."

You, my Leonard, use and not abuse your day.

Move among your people, know them, follow him who led the way;

Strove for sixty widow'd years to help his homelier brother-men,

Served the poor and built the cottage, raised the school and drain'd the fen.

1 Locksley Hall. Sixty Years after. By Alfred Lord Tennyson. London: Macmillan & Co.

Follow you the star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine;
Forward till you see the highest human nature is divine.

Follow light and do the right—for man can half control his doom-
Till you find the deathless angel seated in the vacant tomb."

This is the shadowed yet not unhopeful conclusion which the poet offers to those who come after him, instead of the passionate gospel of progress which inspired his own youth. We will not quote the more particular records of his disappointment. The critics of the newspapers have already pointed out all that is harsh and painful in the poem, the dreadful picture of "glooming alleys," "sordid attic," and all that is most terrible in the warrens of the poor." Harsh is the strain and

a cry

hopeless, no gospel but
of anger and pain. Nevertheless
there are still gleams of sweeter
experience. The husband for
whom Cousin Amy deserted her
poet-lover, turned out on the whole
something much better than jeal-
ous fancy depicted him. Sixty
years after it is possible to do
justice. Instead of making his
wife "lower to his level day by
day," it is he who is the example,
who "served the poor and built
the cottage," as it behoves his de-
scendant to do.

"Worthier soul was he than I am, sound and honest, rustic Squire,
Kindly landlord, boon companion-youthful jealousy is a liar."

(Oh-h! how that last phrase jars!) And because we love our poet, even when we feel that there is a nobler dignity in silence than in those harsh echoes of the past, we bid the gentle reader who desires no blame to turn

with us from those shrill falsetto notes to a strain in which the old music still breathes with chastened sweetness, perfect as in his prime, when the old poet tenderly recalls the visions of the past.

Yonder in that chapel, slowly sinking now into the ground,
Lies the warrior, my forefather, with his feet upon the hound.

Cross'd! for once he sail'd the sea to crush the Moslem in his pride.
Dead the warrior, dead his glory, dead the cause in which he died.
Yet how often I and Amy in the mouldering aisle have stood,
Gazing for one pensive moment on that founder of our blood!

There again I stood to-day, and where of old we knelt in prayer
Close beneath the casement, crimson with the shield of Locksley-there,
All in white Italian marble, looking still as if she smiled,
Lies my Amy dead in child-birth, dead the mother, dead the child.

Dead, and sixty years ago, and dead her aged husband now,

I, this old white-headed dreamer, stoopt and kiss'd her marble brow.

Gone the fires of youth, the follies, furies, curses, passionate tears,
Gone like fires and floods and earthquakes of the planet's dawning years.

Gone the comrades of my bivouac, some in fight against the foe,
Some through age and slow diseases, gone as all on earth will go.

Gone, with whom for forty years my life in golden sequence ran,
She, with ail the charm of woman, she with all the breadth of man,

Very woman of very woman, nurse of ailing body and mind,
She that link'd again the broken chain that bound me to my kind.

Gone for ever! no; for since our dying race began,
Ever, ever, and for ever was the leading light of man."

We must add one fine passage in which, after a burst of indignant scorn over the working of the Demos, and the chance that the honour of England in all her

imperial concerns might hang on
the verdict of ignorance, the poet,
after he has bidden us fiercely
"take the suffrage of the plow,"
suddenly changes his tone--

"Nay, but these would feel and follow the Truth if only you and you,
Rivals of realm-ruining party, when you speak were wholly true.

Plowmen, shepherds, have I found, and more than once, and still could find
Sons of God, and kings of men, in utter nobleness of mind.

Truthful, trustful, looking upward to the practised hustings-liar,
So the Higher wields the Lower, while the Lower is the Higher."

Thus the poet though for a mo-
ment he is a pessimist, and sad
with disappointment and righteous
rage, yet cannot shut his eyes to
the underlying good.

We will not do Lord Tennyson the injustice to make any comment upon the unfortunate essay in domestic comedy-tragedy which forms the greater part of this volume. The obstinacy with which so old a sovereign of the public in sists upon making the world take back its adverse verdict, is comprehensible enough, however much it may be regretted. To feel that he has failed is a disagreeable surprise for one who has succeeded so constantly. But there are some deficiencies which ought to be acknowledged even in the Temple of Fame itself, and one of these is, that assuredly our Laureate, with all his powers, does not possess that dramatic skill which is given to many meaner men.

From poetry it is but a step to poetical biography, scarcely indeed, in this instance, a step at all; for in the time to come, which we trust may be long delayed, when the records of the present reigning name shall take their place among other memorials of poets departed,

no doubt the "dramatic monologue" of Tennyson's old age will be treated as more or less autobiographical, and discussed by anxious historians eager to find some hidden fact of life beneath every line, as has been done in other cases. It is singular, however, to step from the

"Poor old voice of eighty, crying after voices that have fled,"

to the record, palpitating with youthful pangs and delights, of one who never got beyond the first ecstasy of living, or learned the wisdom or was tamed into the sobriety of mature manhood. The reader who loves literature for itself will have anticipated with interest the Life of Shelley,"1 which has been for some time in preparation by hands so careful and cultivated as those of Professor Dowden. Much has been already written on the subject, and the name of the poet has been confused with many autobiographical records, in which other men have done their best to interest the world in the part they themselves played in his hapless story, quite as much as to chronicle the facts and certainties that concerned their hero. Hogg, Peacock, Med

1 The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Edward Dowden, LL.D. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co.

up

the breaks and intervals in other places from correspondences abridged and suppressed. The book is not one of criticism. It is not intended to expound either the strange chaotic beliefs and wild social theories of the poet, or the modes and methods of his wonderful art. The position of Shelley as a poet is one of those things beyond argument and reason, on which there has never been any real conflict of opinion. Even in those mad days of youth when "Queen Mab " affronted the world, and the poet's bark was launched upon no gentle stream, but in the midst of a whirlpool, the wonderful boy took the imagination captive with a spell impossible to shake off. We believe, even now, that the number of readers who are familiar with his longer poems

win, Trelawney, and how many He has been able to add some names beside, will occur to the chapters to the record, making recollection of every reader it continuous, and to fill all contemporary witnesses, and eager to tell everything, and a little more perhaps than everything, they knew. There followed a silence after the flutter of all these voices, and the interest connected with the poet drooped in the partial and momentary decay of nature; but fame has now had time to come back, and the reputation of Shelley has risen into what is perhaps an extravagant reactionary splendour. Of late years it has become a fashion with a small but enthusiastic sect to place the poet on a pedestal which is something more than that of poetical fame, and to claim for him not only the merited laurel of a great singer, but strange crowns of olive and myrtle, the reward of the philosopher and moralist. Professor Dowden fortunately does not join in these exaggerated claims. His aim is not to support any theory, but to set before us with a fulness of detail not previously attained, the much confused and wandering career of one of the most wayward, if also one of the most interesting, beautiful, and bewildering spirits that ever was clothed in flesh and blood. He has collected and examined the many fragmentary pictures in which Shelley and the curious figures assembled round him have appeared in glimpses before a puzzled world. What has hitherto been to seek in many books, all more or less imperfect, may now finally be found with authority in this. Mr W. M. Rossetti, in the biography prefixed to his edition of Shelley's works, had already done much; but Professor Dowden, with more space and a more perfect command of all the sources of information, has enlarged and completed the work.

the bewildering sweetness of "Alastor," the gorgeous visions of the Revolt of Islam," or even the exquisite melody of some parts of the "Prometheus"-are comparatively few, as few as those who follow Wordsworth through all the valleys and over all the mountains of the "Excursion"; yet Shelley calls forth a warmer enthusiasm than his austere and noble senior. He has the suffrages of those who are capable of judging, and of those who are not. The full flowing stream of perfect sound which carries him along has what we may venture to call an almost mechanical power over multitudes incapable of understanding_his poetry in any higher sense. melodious medium borrows the results of another art. It has the supreme effect of music transporting, by the endless wonder of its harmonies, minds from which its intellectual meaning may be hid, and which want no more than that

That