hunter. In the reaction of his thoughts how vividly is expressed the precious preeminence of European existence, with all its attendant evils! "Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild, But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. I to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains, Mother-Age! (for mine I knew not,) help me as when life begun : Who shall say, after this, that Alfred Tennyson wants power? There speaks the man of this moving age. There speaks the spirit baptized into the great spirit of progress. In the silence of his meditative retreat the poet sees the world rolling before him, and is struck with the majesty of its mind subduing its physical mass to its uses, and trampling on time, space, and the far greater evils-prejudice, false patriotism, and falser ideas of glory. Brotherhood, peace, and comfort advance out of the school and the shop, and happiness sits securely beneath the guardianship of "The parliament of man, the federation of the world." Alfred Tennyson has given many a fatal blow to many an old and narrow maxim in his poems; he has breathed into his latter ones the generous and the victorious breath of noblest philanthropy, the offspring of the great renovator -the Christian religion. This will give him access to the bosoms of the multitude "Men our brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new;" and his vigorous song will cheer them at their toil, and nerve them to more glorious efforts. Of the hold which his poetry has already taken on the public heart, a striking instance was lately given. The anonymous author of The New Timon stepped out of his way and his subject to represent Tennyson's muse as a puling school-miss. The universal outburst of indignation from the press scared the opprobrious lines speedily out of the snarler's pages. A new edition was quickly announced, from which they had wisely vanished. Perhaps, however, the crown of all Tennyson's verse is The Two Voices. I have said that he is not metaphysical. He is better. Leaving to others to build and rebuild theories of the human mind, Tennyson deals with its palpable movements like a genuine philosopher, and one of the highest order, a Christian philosopher. The Two Voices are the voice of an animated assurance in the heart, and the voice of skepticism. In this poem there is no person who has passed through the searching, withering ordeal of religious doubts and fears as to the spiritual permanence of our existence and who has not ?-but will find in these simple stanzas the map and history of their own experience. The clearness, the graphic power, and logical force and acumen which distinguish this poem are of the highest order. There is nothing in the poems of Wordsworth which can surpass, if it can equal it. Let us take, as our last quotation, the closing portion of this lyric, the whole of which can not be read with too much attention. Here the combat with Apollyon in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is most simply and beautifully put an end to by the buoyant spirit of nature, and man walking amid his human ties hand in hand with her and piety. "The still voice laughed. 'I talk,' said he, 'Why not set forth if I should do 'Whatever crazy sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death. Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, I ceased, and sate as one forlorn. One walked between his wife and child, I blessed them, and they wandered on; A second voice was at mine ear, * Suicide. As from some blissful neighborhood, 'I see the end and know the good.' A hint, a whisper breathing low, Like an Æolian harp that wakes Far thought with music that it makes. Such seemed the whisper at my side: 'What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?' I cried. So heavenly toned, that in that hour I wondered at the bounteous hours, I wondered, while I passed along: Than him that said, 'Rejoice! rejoice!'" So much for the poetry, but still where is the poet? It may be supposed by what has already been said, that he is not very readily to be found. Next to nothing has yet been known of him or his haunts. It has been said that his poetry showed from internal evidence that he came somewhere out of the fens. In three fourths of his verses VOL. II.-Z there is something about "glooming flats," "the clustered marish-mosses," a poplar, a water-loving tree, that "Shook alway, All silver green with gnarled bark; For leagues no other tree did mark The level waste, the rounding gray.' Or a whole Lincolnshire landscape of— "A sand-built ridge Of heaped hills that mound the sea, Overblown with murmurs harsh, Crowned by a lowly cottage whence we see Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh, Where from the frequent bridge, Like emblems of infinity, The trenched waters run from sky to sky." There are 'Long dim wolds ribbed with snow. Willows whiten, aspens shiver;" thorough fen-land objects; "A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand; Left on the shore." These images show a familiarity with fen-lands, and flat sea-coast, to a certainty; but Alfred Tennyson, after all, though a Lincolnshire man, is not a native of the fens. He was born near enough to know them well, but not in them. His native place is Somersby, a little village lying about midway between the market-towns of Spilsby and Horncastle, and containing less than a hundred inhabitants. His father, George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., was rector of that and the adjoining parish of Enderby. He was a man of very various talents-something of a poet, a painter, an architect, and a musician. He was also a considerable linguist and mathematician. Dr. Tennyson was the elder brother of Mr. Tennyson d'Encourt, M.P. Alfred Tennyson, one of several children, was born at the parsonage at Somersby, of which a view stands at the head of this chapFrom the age of seven till about nine or ten, he went to the grammar-school of Louth, in the same county, and ter. |