the progress of mankind and observed the trend of the times. Realizing the needs of the age, he grandly rose to the occasion—either to lift up his voice in protest against its faults, or to sing its achievements.

For many years no strangers have been admitted to Farringford Park. Visitors, while welcome at Aldworth in the afternoon, have not been allowed to interrupt the accustomed occupations of the master of the house, who is very methodical in his habits. It has long been his custom to rise early and spend the morning hours in his study—writing and dreaming in an atmosphere laden with smoke and the odor of tobacco. He now uses the pen but little, owing to failing eyesight. The Honorable Hallam Tennyson is his secretary and constant companion.

Personally, his lordship is a man who would attract attention anywhere, with his stalwart form slightly stooping, his noble face, his long flowing hair and bushy beard. He dresses carelessly, and when out of doors wears a shocking bad hat; with his cloak and walking-stick, he makes a picturesque figure. He is a confirmed pedestrian. “Every morning,” says a newspaper correspondent, “in hail, rain or snow, the poet dons his frouzy cap and his frouzier slouch hat, and promenades for an hour or so, none daring to disturb him.”

Tennyson is taciturn and brusque before strangers, whose presence annoys him, but he is delightfully easy and spontaneous with friends. Edward Fitzgerald, in his letters to Frederick Tennyson and others, alludes again and again, in terms of enthusiastic appreciation, to Alfred’s wise and pointed conversation. One of his original “sayings, which strike the nail on the head,” was about Dante. It is well worth quoting in Fitzgerald’s concise language, taken from a letter written in 1876:

“What Mr. Lowell says of him recalled to me what Tennyson said to me some thirty-five or forty years ago. We were stopping before a shop in Regent street where were two figures of Dante and Gœthe. I (I suppose) said, ‘What is there in old Dante’s face that is missing in Gœthe’s?’ And Tennyson (whose profile then had certainly a remarkable likeness to Dante’s) said: ‘The divine.’”

From first to last Alfred Tennyson has recognized that the mission of the poet is that of an æsthetic teacher. Much has he done to educate English-speaking people in the appreciation of beauty. But he is emphatically more than this. A man of stainless reputation, his deeds and words have almost invariably been on the side of righteousness. His career has been free from the excesses which disgraced the lives of Marlowe and Shelley, of Byron and Poe. He is rather to be ranged with the Spensers and Miltons, the Wordsworths and Brownings, as a defender of truth and religion. In the main he has steadfastly kept in mind the austere ideal—

Of those who, far aloof
From envy, hate and pity, and spite and scorn,
Live the great life which all our greatest fain
Would follow, center’d in eternal calm.

II.

The current of Tennyson’s genius is like a rivulet placidly flowing through meadows and groves, occasionally rippling and swirling over stones, then pursuing its even course—gradually widening and deepening; not like a mighty river proudly sweeping in a resistless flood through a wilderness, or tumbling down rocky chasms. All that he has given the world during sixty years of literary activity is contained in less than a dozen volumes of verse. Only a rapid survey of his poetical career is attempted here.

Passing by without comment Poems by two Brothers (1826), “The Lover’s Tale” (composed about 1828), and “Timbuctoo” (1829), we come to Tennyson’s first bid for fame in Poems, chiefly Lyrical (1830). This slender volume included (along with much rubbish) a few pieces which are perennial favorites with lovers of Tennyson, viz.: “Mariana,” “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” “The Dying Swan,” “A Dirge,” “Love and Death,” and “Circumstance.” Among the poems suppressed in later editions is one in an unusual vein—“Nero to Leander”—which Emerson inserted in his Parnassus.

His second book of Poems (1833) was a more ambitious venture. Its contents, though marred by faults of crude taste, possessed in a marked degree, the characteristic qualities of the Laureate’s poetry. Nearly all of the lyrics in it have been found worthy of a permanent place in the collected editions of his poems, but most of them underwent countless changes before they were republished in 1842—being corrected and polished till they were well-nigh perfect from a critical standpoint.

The two volumes of Poems (1842) revealed Tennyson at his best—a mature singer whose dignified, harmonious verse compares favorably with the most splendid contributions to British poetry. “The Princess” (1847), “In Memoriam” (1850), and “Maud” (1855) made his position secure as the greatest of living poets.

Not satisfied to rest content as a lyrist, Tennyson essayed extended narrative in Idyls of the King (1859) and “Enoch Arden” (1864). Gaining courage from the enthusiastic reception of the four Arthurian idyls, he undertook to carry out a long cherished design—which Milton and Dryden had conceived—of writing a national epic on King Arthur. He had already made several attempts at versifying incidents from the Mabinogion and Malory’s old romance Morte d’ Arthur, but they were isolated fragments. From time to time he added others, making the series of tales called the Round Table a complete cycle as follows:

The Coming of Arthur, 1869; Gareth and Lynette, 1872; Geraint and Enid, 1859; Balin and Balan, 1885; Merlin and Vivien, 1859; Lancelot and Elaine, 1859; The Holy Grail, 1869; Pelleas and Ettarre, 1869; The Last Tournament, 1871; Guinevere, 1859; The Passing of Arthur, 1842, 1869.

Then boldly entering the dangerous field of historical drama, Tennyson became a rival of Shakspeare himself in “Queen Mary”[14] (1875), “Harold” (1876), and “Becket” (1884). Besides these, he brought forth three shorter plays or dramatic sketches—“The Cup”[15] (1884), “The Falcon”[16] (1884), “The Promise of May”[17] (1886), and a lengthy idyllic drama called “The Foresters”[18] (1892).

As if to prove that his fertility was not exhausted in the province of the lyric, he made fresh incursions into fields of song long familiar to him. These winnowings of the last two decades are gathered into the following volumes:

Ballads, and Other Poems (1880); Tiresias, and Other Poems (1885); Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, etc. (1886); Demeter, and Other Poems (1889).

Enough books have been named to give at least half a dozen minstrels a firm footing on Parnassus. The number of Tennyson’s meritorious performances is