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Profundis," "Despair," "The Dead Prophet," Vastness," "Forlorn," "The Death of Oenone," "Doubt and Prayer," "The Silent Voices," "Crossing the Bar," and those numerous odes, tributes, and sonnets whose opening lines give us the key to the burden and the song that follows.

Here is a list of poems not only lyric and contemplative, but positively commemorative and plaintive, some of them striking a clear minor note of tender sympathy and mournful regret over the flight of time, the loss of opportunity, the sudden. frustration of cherished plans; in fine, over the sorrows and disappointments of human life-a kind of series of elegiac idyls. Thus, in his poem "Vastness," he sings with sighing:

Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanished face,

Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanished race.

Stately purpose, valour in battle, glorious annals of army and fleet,

Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, trumpets of victory, groans of defeat.

So, in his graphic poem "The Vision of Sin," in which are pictured the desolations of evil and the wild sensualism of the children of lust, as the rider over the withered heath halts at the inn and sings his ribald lines:

Fill the cup, and fill the can!

Have a rouse before the morn!

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment one is born.

Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,

While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance!

Hob-and-nob with brother Death!

The poem reads as if penned amid the bestial excesses of the Restoration rather than in the first half of the nineteenth century, while we read between the lines the poet's lamentation over such a revelation of the sin of the human heart. It is a kind of a dirge chanted at the grave of character, the grief of virtue over the shameless boldness of evil.

If we turn, however, from the elegiac type of lyric to those in which the poet's meditations assume a more cheerful and hopeful phase, we shall find a still larger list than before, and, indeed, shall find most of those lyrics that may be said to express his heart's deepest convictions and longings and establish most fully the permanence of his fame.

Such are "The Two Voices," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos-Eaters," with its beautiful choric song; "Love and Duty," "Faith," "Rizpah," "God and the Universe," ""Saint Agnes' Eve," and scores of others with varying degrees of poetic merit, all, however, expressive of the author's deep and quiet musings on the life here and hereafter and man's relation to each of them, while in "The Idylls of the King," in such portions of it especially as "The Holy Grail" and "The Passing of Arthur," this lyric

pensiveness reaches some of its tenderest and most impressive forms.

In "The Ancient Sage" how imposingly the poet summons us out of our baser selves and surroundings to all that is noblest and best in thought and action:

Wherefore thus be wise,

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt;
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of "Yes" and "No,"
She sees the best that glimmers through the worst,
She feels the sun is hid but for a night,

She spies the summer thro' the winter's bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,

She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they wailed, "Mirage."

What a profound philosophy he teaches as to the possible explanation of most of the trials of man: My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves, So dark that men cry out against the heavens. Who knows but that the darkness is in man? The doors of night may be the gates of light.

Such is the clear and comforting note that sounds out to the world from Tennyson's broad and responsive nature, bidding us betake ourselves from thoughts of doubt and despondency and woeful prophecies of evil, and rise to a higher plane of truth and outlook and to the vision of ultimate victory.

Two or three additional marks of Tennyson's reflective lyrics are worthy of note. One of them is seen in the remarkable manner in

which, in such

lyrics, he combines the spiritual and natural, the subjective words of the thoughtful mind and the more objective and practical habit of the man of affairs busy in the work and ways of the world. Such a combination is both an evidence of skill in literary art and of a catholic mind in the observation of the world of sense and spirit. Hence we have such practical lyrics as "Alexander," "Buonaparte," "Poland," "England and America," "Wellington," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "The Third of February, 1852," "Wages," "In the Children's Hospital," "Columbus," and the two "Locksley Halls," in which he lifts up his voice in passionate protest against the wrongs of society and his own native land, closing with the stirring sum

mons:

Follow light, and do the right-for man can half control his doom

Till you find the deathless angel seated in the vacant tomb.

Pointed and practical as these poems are, there is running through them all a deep, intense vein of serious sentiment, as the poet insists on calling men in all their struggles, ambitions, and defeats to the eternal laws of truth and justice and love and divine Providence. Tennyson was a dreamer, but by no means a daydreamer; making poetry a pleasure, but also a sober mental industry; a man of the world as well, and yet a man of both worlds, teaching us that, after all, earth and heaven are closely next each other, and cannot safely be divorced in the life

of any man. He believed in the "higher pantheism," or, as he writes in "The Human Cry:"

We feel we are nothing, for all is Thou and in thee;
We feel we are something-that, also, has come from thee;
We know we are nothing, but thou wilt help us to be,
Hallowed be thy name . . . Hallelujah!

Readers of these lyrics must also be impressed in noting how successfully they serve to connect the past and the present, the old and the new, older and younger England and Europe, coordinating thus the different eras in the life of man, being true alike to precedent and history, on the one hand, and, on the other, to all the claims of recent progress and the widening development of thought and life. He had what he calls "the passion of the past," and he had the passion of the present. Thus he sang of "Locksley Hall," and of "Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After." Thus, in "The Idylls of the King," he renewed in Victorian days the memories of the older time of Celtic and British history, as in such poems as Northern

Farmer" and "The Battle of Brunanburh" we see the happy deference to England's earlier days and deeds.

More than this, it was reserved for the genius and insight of Tennyson to strike the note of British lyrical verse on its more serious side for the opening years of the twentieth century, and in so sweet and clear and strong a key that our coming bards will find it difficult not to feel it. As Spenser in the Elizabethan era, and Milton in the age of the Stu