love which without particular direction arises out of pity for the helpless, and to the love we feel for the natural world. Thus the various questions that issue out of the main question, and the main question itself, are answered by showing what love would naturally reply. Now the effects of true love are always beautiful, and he who represents them with love and joy embodies beauty.

So Tennyson made the woman's question lovely. But he was so exalted by this abiding in love that he could not help at times in the poem breaking out into lyric songs, in which he might express a keener feeling of beauty, and reach a higher range of poetry than in the rest of the poem, where the subject forbade him to rise above a certain level. So he wrote in the midst of the poem two love-songs, one of the sorrow of love past by for ever, of the days that are no more; another of the joyful hope of love, of the days that were to come. The first of these, Tears, idle tears, as I have already said, represents more nearly than any of the songs of Tennyson, but chiefly in the last verse, one phase, at least, of the passion of love between man and woman. It does not represent its enjoyment, but the wild continued existence in unfulfilment. verses which lead up to this intense climax with slow and soft approaches are drenched through and through, more than any other regretful song I know, more even than any of Shelley's songs, in the heavy dew of long and living sorrow for love just touched but unattained.

regret of its

The three

The Princess hears the song and calls its tone to order.

If indeed there haunt

About the moulder'd lodges of the past

So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men,

Well needs it we should cram our ears with wool
And so pass by.

Then rising on a wave of hope and effort, she bids her girls sail on to the great year to come, and in one of the noblest similes in the poem, Tennyson paints the disappearance of the mightiest ideas of the past in the warm life of the future.

While down the streams that float us each and all
To the issue, goes, like glittering bergs of ice,
Throne after throne, and molten on the waste
Becomes a cloud.

At this the Prince, emboldened, sings of hope in love; a mere love poem the Princess calls it, in her fresh disdain. "Great is song," she says, "used to great ends"; "duer unto freedom, force and growth of spirit than to junketing and love," phrases which represent Tennyson's own view, in certain moods, of the aim of Poetry. Yet the song is lovely in movement; its wing-beating and swiftglancing verse is like the flight of the bird that has suggested it.

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying south.

Both songs are unrhymed, yet no one needs the rhyme, so harmoniously is their assonance arranged, not so much at the end of each line as in the body of the lines themselves. Tears, idle tears is a masterpiece of the careful employment of

vowels.

The song of triumph which Ida sings is also

unrhymed. The comparison of the cause of woman to a tree is too elaborate in detail, and is not throughout well developed, but the last verse has its own splendour, and the tree becomes a Universe-tree.

Our enemies have fall'n, but this shall grow,
A night of summer from the heat, a breadth
Of autumn, dropping fruits of power; and roll'd
With music in the growing breeze of Time,
The tops shall strike from star to star, the fangs
Shall move the stony bases of the world.

The last song in the body of the poem :

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white :

is still unrhymed, and might be called the palacesong of love, so full is it with the rich and lovely things which belong to the royal gardens of the earth, when night in a a clear sky has fallen on them. But of itself, the song and the love in it are not of much worth.

When Tennyson, however, had read over what he had done, the overwhelming mastery of love, of love of every kind, which fills the poem, urged him to new creation, and he celebrates love in six of its various phases-in six delightful and happy songs, inserted in the third edition between the main divisions of the poem. They were, he says, ballads or songs to give the poets breathing space. So

The women sang

Between the rougher voices of the men,
Like linnets in the pauses of the wind.

They are all of a sweet and gentle humanity, of a fascinating and concentrated brevity, of common

moods of human love made by the poet's sympathy and art to shine like the common stars we love so well. The falling out of wife and husband reconciled over the grave of their child, the mother singing to her babe of his father coming home from sea, the warrior in battle thinking of his home, the iron grief of the soldier's wife melted at last into tears by his child laid upon her knee, the maiden yielding at last to love she had kept at bay-these are the simple subjects of these songs. They please this large poet, he was at home in them, and as long as human nature lasts they will please the world, because they will endear love to the world.

Among these the cradle song,

Sweet and low, sweet and low,

Wind of the western sea,

is the most beautiful and writes, as it were, its own music, but the song,

The splendour falls on castle walls,

And snowy summits old in story,

is the noblest, a clear, uplifted, softly-ringing song. It sings, in its short compass, of four worlds, of ancient chivalry, of wild nature, of romance where the horns of Elfland blow, and of the greater future of mankind. And in singing of the last, it touches the main subject of love, love not of person to person, but of each life to all the lives that follow

it:

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.

Yet it is the lover who tells this to his sweetheart, and the universal element is made delicate by its

union with the personal love of these two happy creatures. It is well that the soul of man should enter into the close of the song, but the greatest poetical beauty has been reached in the second verse, where by a magical employment of words the whole world of Elfland is created, and with it all the romantic tales echo in the ear.

These are the songs of this delightful poem, and it is with some difficulty that we turn away from them to speak of the way in which Tennyson has treated the social side of his subject. It seems necessary, however, to discuss for a little time his views of the woman's question.