"The dawn, the dawn," and died away;
The East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.

Thus the "spectres of the mind are laid. Indeed, these questionings of the understanding on subjects beyond its powers, and over which men and women worry themselves into a prolonged infancy of restlessness or a senility of pride, are mere phantasms which the intellect creates in its vanity with which to trouble love. There are only two ways of getting rid of them-one is the way that Tennyson pictures in his own fashion in the rest of In Memoriam-the way of love and of faith following on love—and all may read it there, expressed in pure art, and in a series of short poems which are as lovely in form as they are in feeling, as full of the higher human passion as they are of an exquisite sentiment for the beauty of Nature, and so closely knit together by spiritual joy that they-rising incessantly from point to point of universal love-form a single poem. is the triumphal march of Love. It is also a triumph

of art.

It

The other way of getting rid of these questionings of the understanding concerning those things which it never can prove is to empty the mind of them entirely, abandon all care for anything beyond this present world. It is a way many take, and it has its advantages. It sets the mind free to give itself wholly to the practical business, as it is called, of life. But it has also a disadvantage which may be excessively unpractical. It leaves the soul empty of the ideas

to

which carry man and his work beyond this world, and which link all the history and end of mankind a wider history, and to an eternal life. It leaves personal love forlorn, and human love for all men in the arms of death. The history of the universal love of man is made by it a history of universal death.

Many persons stand that easily. It does not trouble them, but I do not know any poet, even the most despairing, who does not at times soar above it or regret it. At least, Tennyson could not endure it, and he was never satisfied till he had left it behind him. "Power was with me," he cries, "in the night;" and in the rush of love by which he clasped to his spirit the living being of his dead friend, faith in life filled his heart. "I cannot understand," he said, "but I love." This is the beginning of his victory; and as love creates life and joy wheresoever it moves, all things change now to the poet. whole of nature breathes and thrills of his friend; every memory of him, while they walked amidst her beauty, is happy.

No gray old grange, or lonely fold,

Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple stile from mead to mead,
Or sheep-walk up the windy wold;

Nor hoary knoll of ash or haw

That hears the latest linnet trill,
Nor quarry trench'd along the hill,
And haunted by the wrangling daw;

Nor runlet trickling from the rock;
Nor pastoral rivulet that swerves
To left and right thro' meadowy curves,
That feed the mothers of the flock,

The

But each has pleased a kindred eye,
And each reflects a kindlier day;
And leaving these, to pass away,
I think once more he seems to die.

All humanity also opens before him, filled with hopes that will not shame themselves. It is here that "Ring out wild bells" comes into the poem, "Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace"; and with this universal hope, impulse to make his sorrow into love for man deepens his heart. "I will not shut me from my kind," he sings, "nor feed with sighs the passing wind." Then, that he may know how he ought to live for man, he draws, in a succession of short poems, the picture of his friend's character and of how he would have lived for the race. And out of it all arises this-That knowledge is needed to save the world from its outward and inward pain, but that knowledge is not enough. Wisdom, such as Arthur had, must be added to knowledge, and must rule it; and wisdom is of things that Love knows, but that knowledge cannot know. "Come then, my friend, enter into me; quicken me with this wisdom of thine; let love be all in all in me. I could not find God alive, nor my friend, in the questionings of the understanding, but now I love and I have found them both found God, and my friend in God. And with them I have found life, life for myself and life for all my brother men. I see the progress of the world as I have seen my own progress; I see the working of love in the evolution of mankind; I see ourselves labouring on, and our labour useful and lovely when it is for others; and, lastly, I see the great

labour of God's love underlying all and moving to a perfect close."

And all, as in some piece of art,

Is toil co-operant to an end.

And the conclusion that sums the whole is a solemn prayer to God that all the world may conquer, as he has conquered, the besieging years, and the powers of sorrow.

O living will that shalt endure

When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,

Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure,

That we may lift from out the dust
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquer'd years
To one that with us works, and trust,

With faith that comes of self-control,

The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul.

Nine years after Arthur Hallam's death, Tennyson's sister was married, and he writes her marriage song as the epilogue to his poem. We see then what was

his temper of mind in 1842. Had he gone back, had he lost the fruits of the victory he had won? Love is not less, he says, but more. It is solidset like a statue; it is moulded into calm of soul, all passion spent, and he has himself grown into something greater than before; so that his songs of dead regret seem "echoes out of weaker times." It is not that he loves his friend less, but that his friend is with him so closely, in so vivid a life and with so great a power-being as it were a part

of God and of the life of God in him—that only joy remains.

Even as he sits at the wedding feast, he feels Arthur with them, wishing joy. And then, as before, he passes from the personal, from the peace of home and its shelter, to think of the greater world of man, of the nobler race which God is making out of ours. He retires when night falls,

and looks out on the skies as the moon rises. "Touch with thy shade and splendour," he cries, the bridal doors; let a soul from their marriage draw from out the vast, and strike his being into bounds, and be a closer link betwixt us and the crowning race, the higher humanity to be, of which my friend (and he sweeps back, enamoured of unity like a poet, to the first subject of In Memoriam) I was a noble type-the race to the making of which God is moving forward the whole creation. Thus he ends with the universal, with the reiteration of the victory of man over pain in the eternity of the love of God:

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

Seven years then passed by, during which Tennyson still revised his poem, during which his spirit was continually kept close to the conclusions of faith and hope and love, and of love the greatest of these three, to which he had come in In Memoriam. How would he feel towards these when so long a term of years had come to an end? We have an answer to that question in