BOOKS.

TENNYSON'S WORKS.• THE dainty little volumes of Lord Tennyson's poems which lie before us contain the essential life-work of the poet,

beginning with selections from his early works, headed "Juvenilia," and ending with the very last he has published,—

the beautiful lyrical stanzas called " Crossing the Bar." Lord Tennyson has included in his collection all the poems which he deems worthy of life, and has not in this, or in previous editions of his collected works, republished such ephemeral sallies as his stanzas—of which Mr. Jennings lately reminded us—in answer to the first Lord Lytton's virulent attack

on him in The New Timm Such verses, like Newman's " blots " in the original Apologia, were the cut-and-thrust of the duel ; and when time has healed the wounds on either

side, and death has long since taken from us one of the com- batants, Tennyson, like Newman, did well to forget. And yet it is strange now to look back at the time when the verdict which England has long since passed was so little general as the following stanza in answer to his critic

implied:—

"But men of long-enduring hopes,

And careless what the hour may bring, Can pardon little would-be Popes, And Brummels when they try to sting."

The length to which Lord Tennyson's days have been, happily for us, prolonged, have enabled him to witness a universal appreciation of his genius which for the bulk of our great poets, from Shakespeare downwards, has been awarded by posterity only. He has had his share, and more than his share, of misunderstanding and ignorant criticism ; but he has had a share, rarely if ever surpassed, of ultimate

influence and recognition in his own lifetime, and holds at the present moment a position in the literary world only rivalled in this century by Sir Walter Scott, in the many-sided admiration and respect which it represents. The other great name—the name also of a poet—which suggests itself in con- nection with contemporary fame in the same period, could never command that respect for moral elevation without which such fame lacks its highest quality. Of the many young men who sighed with Byron and were fired by his genius, only those who were disposed to catch the fever in earnest, and to be Byrons in the action of life, could give him a whole-hearted admiration.

It would be impossible in such space as we have at our command, to institute any careful inquiry into the sources of Tennyson's influence over Englishmen ; but one great source of its wide extent is his many-sidedness, and his consequent appeal to very various minds. To illustrate this would require great fullness and variety of quotation. The many gradations, however, are suggested by the extremes on either side. It is not often that a writer who is familiar with the deepest pro- blems of metaphysics, can turn in a moment, with unequalled

naturalness and grace, to those simple feelings and thoughts which bring out the kinship of a whole nation, of high and

low, of learned and unlearned. To satisfy the fastidious intellectualist at one moment, to tax his powers of interpreta- tion, and appeal to the whole range of his literary knowledge

and perception, and the next moment to strike a great common chord—of pride in national glory, of reverence for the Sovereign, of the simple pathos of the joys and griefs of

home, of domestic love, of English village life—this com- bination is not common. Tens of thousands have cried over

• no Works ‘1 Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In 12 vols. London : Ma,m111-vn anal Co. 1592.

" The Lord of Burleigh," " The May Queen," " Rizpah," "The Children's Hospital," "The Grandmother ;" have laughed over " The Northern Farmer," " The Northern Cobbler," "The Village Wife ; " have been fired with a soldier's enthusiasm as they read " The Charge of the Light

Brigade ;" have joined in a whole nation's tears at the lines, solemn and significant to all as the funeral bell itself:— "Bury the great Duke

With an empire's lamentation.

Let us bury the great Duke To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation, Mourning when their leaders fall, Warriors carry the warrior's pall, And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall."

And these readers have known that the man who could utter so beautifully their own simple thoughts, or give such unsuspected delicacy of explanation to their own simple feelings, was not merely a master of melody and expression ; that he dwelt in company with the deepest problems of his age ; that he touched the heights of science and the depths of metaphysics. He has bridged the gulf, so often unnecessarily widened, between the uneducated mind and the educated. Each class finds food in these volumes, and often in the very same poems, whose outline is visible to the many, while their full meaning and artistic finish are appreciated by only a. few. And, again, there has been a large class of cultivated readers to whom one-half of " In Memoriam," " The Ancient Sage," the " De Profundis," " Vastness," were uninteresting, and who have yet dwelt in Arthur's halls, and followed the mystic history of the Round Table, have been haunted by the heartbreaking pathos of Lancelot and Elaine, or of Guine- vere's last parting with Arthur; while there are other readers for whom the threads of thought traceable from the immature Confessions of a Sensitive Mind," and onward through "The Two Voices," "In Memoriam," "Vastness," "The Ancient Sage," have been interwoven with the very texture of their spiritual musings, and who yet have not the sense of melody or the delicate appreciation of literature, as such, which are needed to follow the poet through so much of his song.

It is, of course, both an effect and a cause of Tennyson's wide popularity, that so many of his lines have passed into familiar proverbs. No poet, perhaps, since Shakespeare affords so many aphorisms full of truth and wisdom,—from the simplest though ever-true philosophy of every-day life, to the higher intuitions of genius. Here, again, Lord Tennyson distributes his favours to many classes of mind. The consolations and pleasures of the simplest poetry are in reach of all, like the consolations and hopes of religion. Many of all classes have repeated with a sad attempt at thankfulness, " 'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Numbers who have bowed their heads in faith to the words, "The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord," find farther expression of the duty of resignation in the line : " God gives us love, something to love he lends us."

All the satisfaction—such as it is—of a proverbial general rule which explains the wrong from which they suffer, has come to many from the line : —

" A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies."

And such instances of simple and familiar proverbs from Tennyson might be multiplied tenfold. Again, we have the terse expression of deep truths which appeal to thinking men : —" Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers ; " " We needs must love the highest when we see it ; "

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds ;"

or the more recent trenchant summary of the tyranny and

lawlessness which have walked beneath the banner of " Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite : "- "Freedom free to slay herself and dying while they shout her name."

These are some of the most familiar, and if we touched on somewhat longer ones, their number would be very great.

" In Memoriam " alone would yield a large supply.

Is Lord Tennyson's appeal to very different natures and capacities resolvable into a more elementary fact in regard to his genius? We believe that it is ; and without pre- tending to enter fully into the question, we may indicate roughly our meaning. Mr. Ruskin has contrasted two forms of imagination,— the imagination which idealises, which is sharply contrasted with matter-of-fact observa- tion, and sees in a flower, not its true features, but all

the romantic associations it suggests ; and the imagination which intensifies exactness in observation, which sees every shade of colour in the flower, every beauty of Nature as beneath a microscope. The second species is compatible with associa- tions of fancy as well, but its essential feature is that it casts the limelight of the poet's intensely keen perception on the true features of the object. Lord Tennyson's imagination is eminently of this second and higher order, and its vivid light is shed not only on natural objects, but on the moral, social, and spiritual world. He appeals to all because he sees and loves what interests each. The intensity of his perception (if one may so speak) shows to him a beauty in the simplest objects, and in the whole of this fair earth, which prevents anything from being commonplace to him as it is to those who see less. What an unobservant man would pass by as a mass of green foliage, would be seen by him in its immense variety as truly as by a scientific botanist, but with a light upon it shed by genius, and not the mere interest given by science. And so, too, in the world beyond the senses, —the world of human affections, passions, convictions, aspira- tions. Under his delicate microscope, the homely grandmother or the village wife are not rough types, but are seen each as having her share in the "abysmal depths of personality." And so he cares to paint, with exquisite delicacy, spheres of life and persons and things familiar to the many, though with an art and power of vision which can be fully appreciated by very few. His faithful reproduction of nature endears him to the numbers to whom he presents their own thoughts and ideas ; but the art by which this perfect naturalness is attained, and by which the setting of each scene—the life and world in which his actors move—is conveyed, is as remarkable for its unobtrusiveness as for its success. And the very same habits of microscopic observation, exercised with equal but not greater care, are visible in his dealings with the world of spirit. In the spiritual musings of "In Memoriam," of "De Prof midis," of " Despair," of parts of the second " Locksley Hall," of the two great reflective poems of his later life of which we have already spoken, " Vastness," and " The Ancient Sage," he surveys with exact and vivid insight the high questionings, conjectures, hopes, fears, the vast range of possibilities into contact with which science brings the educated and thoughtful mind, as he had surveyed the small and homely world—the world of few ideas and little knowledge—in his simpler poems. In each case, facts penetrate him. The range and complexity of his thought, the number and import of the facts it embraces, the wide sweep of his imagination, are revealed notably in "Vastness." And yet the mind which can thus survey the universe, and grapple with the problems it presents, is the same to which the death of the little child in the hospital had all the reality and deep pathos which surrounds one single human life. Indeed, the very poem of which we have spoken—" Vastness "—reveals quite as much his sense of the infinite pathos and importance of the single life, as his sense of the mystery and immensity of the universe. And it is, perhaps, this essentially Christian view of life which has given him the will, as his peculiar genius has given him the power, to touch so many hearts. Every man finds his own simple joys and hopes echoed in these volumes ; and the philosophy they breathe is here in absolute contrast to that of the great thinker of antiquity, who had "no beatitudes for the poor." We know the happiness given to a poor man by a kind word or a brief visit from Royalty ; and the sense that his lot is thought worthy of the interest of those who are so far above it, forms great part of that happiness. A pleasure very similar in kind is given by a man of com- manding genius and great gifts, who shows, as Tenny- son has done, keen interest in the little world of home, and the possibilities of every sphere of life. Aristotle's " magnanimous " man used irony with the common herd ; Tennyson is interested in each individual. He never sees them as a herd, and was probably never ironical in his life.