she is softened by the child's silent appeal to her womanhood:

"I took it for an hour in mine own bed

This morning; there the tender orphan hands

Felt at my heart, and seem'd to charm from thence
The wrath I nursed against the world."

Her soul, it is plain, is now a kingdom divided against itself. It cannot stand. But when Cyril appeals to her to give it back to the mother, all the woman surges up; she kisses it, and feels that "her heart is barren," and we hear in the phrase the regret of her life for the motherhood she has abandoned. Then she passes by the wounded Prince, and his old father, his beard dabbled in his son's blood, points to her hair and picture on his heart. She thinks of his love; and all

Her iron will was broken in her mind,

Her noble heart was molten in her breast.

Give him to me," she cries, "to tend in the palace." Then she finds her friend Psyche, who begs forgiveness for her flight from the college. At first, rapt in the child, she does not answer. Her brother, who has fought for her, cannot understand her hard

ness:

"Ida-'sdeath! You blame the man;

You wrong yourselves-the woman is so hard
Upon the woman.'

Her father cries out at her: "No heart have you." The father of the Prince breaks out :

"Woman, whom we thought woman even now,
And were half-fool'd to let you tend our son,

Because he might have wish'd it--but we see
The accomplice of your madness unforgiven;
the rougher hand
Is safer on to the tents; take up the Prince."

Step by step, natural love invades her will, love of children, pity for the man who loves her, love of her friend :

The touch of that which kills her with herself

drags her from her isolation. Finally, she throws open the whole college in pity of the wounded and in personal indignation with Lady Blanche. Whatever man lies wounded, friend or foe,

Shall enter, if he will. Let our girls flit

Till the storm die.

The same action of natural love besets and conquers Psyche. She will not betray her brother to the death, and forgets her oath, and she clung

About him, and betwixt them blossom'd up

From out a common vein of memory

Sweet household talk and phrases of the hearth.

Melissa does not bear that heart within her breast,

To give three gallant gentlemen to death;

and all the mob of girls cry, when the hour is stormy, that their May is passing-that love, children, ruling of a house are far from them-that men hate learned women. Theirs is the vulgar cry, but it is forced on them by an isolation which denies nature. And the vulgarity passes away when they tend the wounded, when pity and tenderness are allowed full scope, when love is born in the college glades.

Thus, the natural affections break down the Princess and her plan.

women.

This main contention in the poem is mixed up with a concise representation of the common prejudices of men concerning the work of Different characters represent different opinions. The father of the Princess, King Gama, lets things slide. "I let Ida have her way," he says; "it did not matter to me. I wanted peace and no dispute. Let my daughter play her game." This indifferent, half-contemptuous treatment of the earnestness of women by the man, mingled with an irritating profession of love for them, is not unknown to the women of the present day.

Then there is the rough old King, the father of the Prince. He is the image of the savage view come down to modern times. Ida's opinions of her sex and its work are rampant heresy to him. "Look you, sir," he breaks out,

"Man is the hunter: woman is his game;

and the lines which follow put this opinion with admirable bluntness.

Cyril, bold, reckless and honourable, the lover of the sex, represents another type. When he hears the women lecture, and the Prince says "They do all this as well as we,"

"

They hunt old trails," said Cyril,
very well :
But when did woman ever yet invent?"

I looked on

"What is all this learning to me? Psyche, and she made me wise in another way. I learnt more from her in a flash than if every Muse tumbled a science into my empty brain. Love has

come in with me into the college, and I have thought to roar, to break my chain, and shake my mane." This is the natural man who thinks that love is all, who, when he loves, idealises the woman into the teacher of things which no knowledge can give him, but who always thinks that his man's strength is the natural victor over the woman. Yet, he it is whom Tennyson chooses to put his main contention. Cyril loves Psyche, and begs the Princess to give back the child. He has no theories, no ideal of woman's future; but he stands for Nature and for love.

O fair and strong and terrible! Lioness

That with your long locks play the Lion's mane!
But Love and Nature, these are two more terrible
And stronger.

These are the main male opinions about women which Tennyson embodied. That of the Prince remains, and he represents Tennyson's full thought upon the matter. After the battle, the Prince and

the Princess are face to face.

And the pity of his long illness, in which she has nursed him tenderly, "and hatred of her weakness, blent with shame," and sight of all the lovers in court and grove, and constant usage of the charities of life, and softening sadness, change her whole soul to gentleness and pity, and both at last to love. And when the Prince awakes to consciousness, and, thinking her who sits beside him some sweet dream, calls her to fulfil the dream to perfection and kiss him ere he die, she stoops and kisses him, and all

Her falser self slipt from her like a robe,
And left her woman.

When in the night he wakes again and hears Ida reading a song that strikes the note of that which is to be their life, they speak together of all that has been. "She was wrong," she says, "she had failed, had sought less for truth than power in knowledge, but something wild within her breast,

A greater than all knowledge, beat her down."

For the moment, no doubt-the moment of her passionate yielding-she does not surrender too much. But she surrenders too much if she speaks as a woman for women. And the Prince, with all his views of pure equality, accepts too much of masterhood. There is a certain lordliness in his lecture on the woman and the man which belongs to Tennyson's attitude on the subject, and which makes me dread that Ida in after years lost a good deal of her individuality. This might be a gain for the comfort of the palace, but it would be a loss to womanhood and to the world. But what the Prince says, independent of his attitude of mind, is true, for the most part, to the heart of the question, and remains true, even though fifty years have passed

away.

But we have now far more data to go upon than Tennyson possessed. The steady work of women during these fifty years, and the points they have so bravely won, have added element after element to our experience. But all that has been gained has made more plain that

The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink
Together.

One is the equal half of the other; the halves are