were John Mitchell Kemble, the Anglo-Saxon scholar; William Henry Brookfield, long an eloquent preacher in London; James Spedding, the biographer and editor of Lord Bacon; Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury; Richard Mockton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), who united the poet and the politician, and was the biographer of Keats; and Richard Chenevix Trench, who became Dean of Westminster in 1856, and Archbishop of Dublin in 1864. A brilliant array of college friends!

Tennyson's prize poem was published shortly after the Cambridge Commencement of 1829, and was very favorably noticed in The Athenæum of July 22, 1829. In it can already be recognized much of the real Tennyson. There are, indeed, but very few poets whose earliest productions exhibit so much of their afterselves. The real Byron, the most vigorous in his diction of all modern poets, hardly appears at all in his Hours of Idleness, which was published when he was about the age that Tennyson was when Timbuctoo was published.

In 1830 appeared Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson. In this volume appeared, among others, the poems entitled Ode to Memory, The Poet, The Poet's Mind, The Deserted House, and The Sleeping Beauty, which were full of promise, and struck keynotes of future works. The reviews of the volume mingled praise and blame the blame perhaps being predominant. In 1832 appeared Poems by Alfred Tennyson, among which were included The Lady of Shalott, The Miller's Daughter, The Palace of Art, The Lotos Eaters, and A Dream of Fair Women, all showing a great advance in workmanship and a more distinctly articulate utterance-many of the poems of the previous volumes being rather artist-studies in vowel and melody suggestiveness. It was reviewed, somewhat facetiously, in The Quarterly, July, 1833, (vol. 49, pp. 81-96) by, as was generally understood, John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, at that time editor of The Quarterly; and in a more earnest and generous vein, by John Stuart Mill, in The Westminster, July, 1835.

A silence of ten years succeeded the 1832 volume, broken only by an occasional contribution of a short poem to some magazine or collection. In 1842 appeared Poems by Alfred Tennyson, in two volumes, containing selections from the volumes of 1830 and 1832, and many new poems, among which were Ulysses, Love and

Duty, The Talking Oak, Godiva, and the remarkable poems of The Two Voices and The Vision of Sin. The volumes were most enthusiastically received, and Tennyson took at once his place as England's great poet. A second edition followed in 1843, a third in 1845, a fourth in 1846, and a fifth in 1848. Then came The Princess: A Medley, 1847; a second edition, 1848; In Memoriam, 1850, three editions appearing in the same year.

The poet was married June 13, 1850, to Emily, daughter of Henry Sellwood, Esq., and niece of Sir John Franklin, of Arctic Expedition fame. Wordsworth had died April 23 of that year, and the laureateship was vacant. After some opposition, the chief coming from The Athenæum, which advocated the claims of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson received the appointment, his In Memoriam, which had appeared a short time before, and which at once laid hold of so many hearts, contributing much, no doubt, to the final decision. His presentation to the queen took place at Buckingham Palace, March 6, 1851, and in the same month appeared the seventh edition of the Poems, with an introductory poem To the Queen, in which he pays a high tribute to his predecessor in the laureateship:

"Victoria, since your royal grace

To one of less desert allows

This laurel greener from the brows
Of him that uttered nothing base."

To do much more than note the titles of his principal works since he became Poet-Laureate, the prescribed limit of this sketch will not allow. In 1855 appeared Maud, which, though it met with great disapprobation and but stinted praise, is, perhaps, one of his greatest poems. In July, 1859, the first of the Idyls of the King appeared, namely, Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere, which were at once great favorites with all readers of the poet; in August, 1864, Enoch Arden, with which were published Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Grandmother, and The Northern Farmer; in December, 1869, four additional Idyls, under the title The Holy Grail and Other Poems, namely, The Coming of Arthur, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettare, and The Passing of Arthur, of which forty thousand copies were ordered in advance; in December, 1871, in The Contemporary Review, The Last Tournament; in 1872, Gareth and Lynette; in

1875, Queen Mary: A Drama; in 1877, Harold: A Drama; in 1880, Ballads and Other Poems.

Tennyson's Muse has been productive of a body of lyric, idyllic, metaphysical, and narrative or descriptive poetry, the choicest, rarest, daintiest, and of the most exquisite workmanship of any that the century has to show. In a strictly dramatic direction he can hardly be said to have been successful. His Queen Mary is but little short of a failure as a drama, and his Harold but a partial success. With action proper he has shown but little sympathy, and in the domain of vicarious thinking and feeling, in which Robert Browning is so pre-eminent, but little ability. But no one who is well acquainted with all the best poetry of the nineteenth century will hesitate to pronounce him facile princeps in the domain of the lyric and idyllic; and in these departments of poetry he has developed a style at once individual and, in an artistic point of view, almost "faultily faultless"-a style which may be traced from his earliest efforts up to the most complete perfection of his latest poetical works.

The splendid poetry he has given to the world has been the product of the most patient elaboration. No English poet, with the exception of Milton, Wordsworth, and the Brownings, ever worked with a deeper sense of the divine mission of poetry than Tennyson has worked. And he has worked faithfully, earnestly, and conscientiously to realize the ideal with which he appears to have been early possessed. To this idea he gave expression in two of his early poems, entitled The Poet and The Poet's Mind; and in another of his early poems, The Lady of Shalott, is mystically shadowed forth the relations which poetic genius should sustain to the world for whose spiritual redemption it labors, and the fatal consequences of its being seduced by the world's temptations-the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

Great thinkers and writers owe their power among men, not necessarily so much to a wide range of ideas, or to the originality of their ideas, as to the intense vitality which they are able to impart to some one comprehensive, fructifying idea, with which, through constitution and the circumstances of their times, they have become possessed. It is only when a man is really possessed with an idea (that is, if it does not run away with him)

that he can express it with a quickening power, and ring all possible changes upon it.

What may be said to be the dominant idea, and the most vitalized, in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson? It is easily noted. It glints forth everywhere in his poetry. It is, that the complete man must be a well-poised duality of the active and the passive or receptive; must unite with an all-subtilizing intellect," an all-comprehensive tenderness"; must "gain in sweetness and in moral height, nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world."

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[Thus far Dr. Corson, of Cornell University, in his Introduction to The Two Voices and A Dream of Fair Women, poems edited by him for Maynard's English Classic Series.]

THE PRINCESS

The Princess was first printed in 1847, and the fifth and definitive edition was published in 1853. At the time of its first publication, the movement in favor of woman's rights was in great danger, because of the absurd length to which it had been carried by ill-advised and short-sighted reformers, of defeating its own ends. The general public did not, as a rule, see the importance and significance of the agitation underlying the absurdities and violence which had become incorporated with the movement. "If women ever play such freaks," wrote Tennyson to Mr. Dawson in a letter expressing the poet's appreciation of the latter's "Study of The Princess,' ‚"""the burlesque and the tragic might go hand in hand," and this remark is significant of the poet's method in the attempt to point out the true life of woman. The poem is, as its sub-title implies, miscellaneous in subject-matter and in treatment. If, as Dr. Van Dyke thinks, this is its most serious defect, yet it is a defect that is all but inevitable; for the subject of woman's rights could not, at that time, be discussed in all seriousness and gain the hearing which it must gain to accomplish its end; for the poem is essentially didactic. That Tennyson recognized the dangers of the mock-heroic style is evident from passages in the Prologue and Conclusion which are more definitely pointed out in the notes.

Professor Wallace has instanced a passage from Comte's System of Positive Polity as an admirable summary of the teaching of the poem:

"Viewed thus, marriage is the most elementary, and yet the most perfect, mode of social life. It is the only association in which entire identity of interests is possible. In this union, to the moral completeness of which the language of all civilized nations bears testimony, the noblest aim of human life is realized, as far as it ever can be. For the object of human existence, as shown in the second chapter, is progress of every kind; progress in morality, that is to say, in the subjection of self-interest to social feeling, holding the first rank. Now this unquestionable principle, which has been already indicated in the second chapter,

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