the law of its conditions, which alone deserves to be honored with the high name of wisdom." But Carlyle, in truth, inspected society with a penetrating vision, and the observation of Mr. Mill-earnest, disinterested, admirable student as he was-too frequently is that of a one-eyed observer, or a man born color-blind. How should one whose feelings had never been cultivated in childhood and youth observe truly? How should a man whose right eye had been put out recognize, for example, the importance of religion as a factor in society? Mr. Mill reasoned. His reasonings were based on the principle that the individual must take the general happiness as his ultimate end; and the reasoner is compelled to admit that questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof in the straightforward sense of the term. He, the philosophical guide of the Liberal party, observed and reasoned, and produced a Political Economy; and who have banished the orthodox Political Economy to Saturn and Jupiter? No; Mr. Mill too often observed insufficiently, or reasoned imperfectly, or started from principles too hastily assumed. Carlyle brought, at least, the complete nature of a devout and passionate man to the aid of observing powers of extraordinary keenness and penetration. And not without effect. Mr. Froude, in a remarkable passage, has described the influence of Carlyle's writings on young men who felt painfully the trouble and difficulty of the time, and were agreed to have done with compromise and conventionalities. "To the young, the generous, to everyone who took life seriously, who wished to make an honorable use of it, and could not be content with making money, his words were like the morning reveille." "Carlyle's doctrine," says Mr. Morley, "has all its foundations in the purest individualism." No; it is empirical utilitarianism, confessing that it cannot prove anything with respect to ultimate ends, which cannot pass beyond individualism; and Carlyle's doctrine has its roots in God-in God, not to be revealed after death, in a beatific vision seated upon the great white throne, but here and now, in his world of sinning, toiling, suffering, striving men and women. "It is to you, ye workers,"

he writes, "who do already work, and are as grown men, noble and honorable in a sort, that the whole world calls for new work and nobleness. Subdue mutiny, discord, widespread despair by manfulness, justice, mercy, and wisdom. Chaos is dark, deep as Hell; let light be, and there is instead a green flowery world. Oh, it is great, and there is no other greatness. To make some nook of God's Creation a little fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God; to make some human hearts a little wiser, manfuller, happier, more blessed, less accursed!'' Such words as these, and the words-so different and yet not wholly alien from the pulpit of St. Mary's, affected young and ardent spirits as words of genuine prophecy. "Early in the eighteen-forties," writes Principal Shairp, "when the Miscel lanies appeared, and became known to undergraduates here at Oxford, I remember how they reached the more active-minded, one by one, and thrilled them as no printed book ever before had thrilled them." And Mr. Froude's confession will not be forgotten: "I, for one (if I may so far speak of myself), was saved by Carlyle's writings from Positivism, or Romanism, or Atheism, or any other of the creeds or no-creeds which in those days were whirling us about in Oxford like leaves in an autumn storm."

Organization of labor, if well understood, said Carlyle, is the problem of the whole future. A practical attempt toward its solution was made by Maurice, Kingsley, Mr. Ludlow, and others, who took the name of "Christian Socialists," and, having little in common with what now styles itself Socialism, beyond a sympathy with the hardships and wrongs of the toiling thousands, maintained as early as 1849 the principle of co-operation as opposed to competition. The literary side of the movement is represented by the disciple, Kingsley, rather than by the master, Maurice. In the gospel which Kingsley preached in tale and sermon there was none of what Mr. Maurice described as Carlyle's wild pantheistic rant, the "big inanity of Pantheism." He spoke of

the fatherhood of God, and of the union of all men in and through Jesus Christ; and yet the old phrases seemed to be in

the permanent and universal sources and elements of poetry, and rarely touched on ideas or emotions peculiar to his own day. Serving our country as one of her most steadfast and highminded public servants, he gave the prose side of his mind to his official work, and reserved its poetical side for dramatic history more on a level with Elizabethan work than any produced in England since the Elizabethan age, and for romantic comedy which might take its place by the side of any comedy written between 1600 and 1640 by any other hand than that of Shakespeare. Questions of metaphysics, questions of theology, had no natural attraction for Henry Taylor's intellect, and thus he was little afflicted by some of the most distracting troubles of our time; but he had an inexhaustible interest in human character, and he gathered from action, observation, meditation, suffering, and delight a fund of moral wisdom which had in it nothing merely abstract, theoretical, or doctrinaire, and which was all available for the purposes of his art. Or rather, having observed and generalized, he threw back into the concrete the general conclusions obtained, with additions and improvements from the fancy. It is impossible, perhaps, that such work should in any age be as popular as work which appeals to the peculiar tastes and feelings of the age, but it is equally impossible that it should ever decline in worth or estimation beyond the high level once attained. Philip van Artevelde and The Virgin Widow will certainly interest lovers of dramatic poetry two hundred years hence no less than they interest lovers of dramatic poetry to-day, for they are wrought out of the enduring stuff of human character, out of the ever-enduring labor and sorrow and joy of the life of man.

If a plébiscite were to pronounce today on the question, Who is the representative poet of the Victorian period?" it is possible that the votes might go in favor of Mr. Browning. Yet the fact is as certain as any fact can be-as certain as that Millais and not Watts, or Leighton, or Burne Jones will be looked on as our representative painter-that Tennyson will remain the singer of the age. It is not the poet who brings the gift most needed by his

own time who represents that time best ; such a poet may be rejected by the age as an alien. It is he (to use the metaphor applied to another purpose by Mr. Gladstone) who gives back to his contemporaries as a river that which he has received from them as vapor. In the earlier years of the present century Byron and Shelley had carried on the impulse of the French Revolution; and in a period of reaction-the period of the White Terror, of the Holy Alliance, of Eldon, and Castlereagh, and Sidmouth-they had advanced the claims of nations and individuals to freedom :"Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind."

The principle of order had found a noble exponent in Wordsworth. When the struggle for parliamentary reform was ended in 1832, it seemed as if for our own country the principles of freedom and of order were reconciled and might march onward with hand clasped in. hand; and because freedom and order were at length conjoined in amity, a steadfast progress of society was assured. Science was daily achieving conquests for humanity; commerce was wresting new realms from barbarism; and should not Poetry gaze into the future, the light of hope within her eyes? It is the conception of a majestic order at one with freedom, and of human progress as resulting from these, which inspires the earlier poetry of Tennyson. King Arthur may fall in battle and disappear from men's sight; the whole Round Table may be dissolved. Shall we therefore despair or lament with intemperate grief? No; "the old order changeth, giving place to new." Is the heart sore with some individual loss or grief? Let us not look back. The distance beacons, and not in vain.

"Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."

Only let the men of England see to it that this movement of advance, as far as they are concerned, be untroubled by violence and "school-boy heat" and "blind hysterics; rather let it be such ordered progress as befits

"A land of settled government,

A land of old and just renown, Where freedom slowly broadens down From precedent to precedent." For order and freedom must henceforth be inseparably united.

The poet's sympathy with science is ardent in an age when science "reaches forth her arms to feel from world to world" and yet once or twice his spirit is vexed by doubts as to the possibility of reconciling scientific observations. with his spiritual faiths and hopes. Happily as yet science had not grown the remorseless antagonist of faith, undermining by her reasonings the very conscience and the religious sentiment; therefore it suffices that the heart, in Tennyson's poem, should stand up as the champion of the soul :

"A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answered, I have felt.'' Largely viewed, science cannot but minister to human welfare if only its freedom be in harmony with spiritual order :

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell."

The "crowning race," as conceived by Tennyson, is one that shall look, eye to eye, on knowledge; holding the earth under command, reading nature like an open book; possessing majestic order in a system of vast federations which shall bind nation to nation in peace, and having a reverent faith in

"One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."

Tennyson's feelings kept pace with those of his generation; and in 1855, after the days of the Chartist upheaval, after Carlyle's vehement indictment of the status quo, and those meagre results which followed the generous efforts of Christian Socialists to serve the suffering poor, his tone grows troubled. Assigning in Maud the exaggerated denunciation of social wrongs to a speaker of morbid temperament, Tennyson expressed through the hero of his monodrama fears and doubts which assailed his own heart and the hearts of many thoughtful men. He, who had dreamed of peace and a federation of races, finds

in the battle ardors of a righteous war deliverance from the selfishness and supineness of spirit which had made social life no better than an internecine

strife during days that were styled days of peace.

In 1886 the tone grows yet more troubled. Again the dramatic device is adopted, and it would be unjust to regard every utterance of the speaker in the second Locksley Hall as expressing a conviction of the writer. But the volume which contains this poem, and presents in the character of Philip Edgar an example of the havoc wrought in young spirits by egoism finding its warrant in a philosophy falsely so called, cannot be viewed as other than an indictment of the times. And assuredly the poet's apprehension that in our own days the course of time may have swerved, "crooked and turned upon itself " in a "backward-steaming curve," is an apprehension shared by many thoughtful minds. The writer of the second Locksley Hall has again given back as a river that which he received from men about him as a vapor-the fears of faith in presence of a godless science, the social fears in presence of a revolution inspired by selfish greeds, the fears of art in presence of a base naturalism which only recognizes the beast in man.

А

But we have as yet noted only onehalf of Tennyson's gift to his time. distinguished living critic has spoken of the renascence of the spirit of wonder and romance in poetry and art, which began in the last century with Ossian and Chatterton and Percy's Reliques, as one of the most important events in the history of English poetry since the days of Addison and Pope. To that renascence of wonder the poetry of Tennyson has contributed in no slight degree. While we read his verse we are now in the heart of our nineteenth century, aware of all the hopes and fears and doubts of this our day, and now we are alone in some world of old romance, or gaze forth from some

'Magic casement, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

The Lady of Shalott. Sir Galahad, St. Agnes, Oriana, The Sleeping Beauty, Morte d'Arthur, are poems belonging

to that movement in literature and art which Mr. Theodore Watts has described as the Renascence of Wonder. The sense of romantic aloofness from our present place and time is perhaps enhanced by the fact that in Tennyson's poetry we never become naturalized citizens of that far country, but pass in and out of the region of romance, never dwelling in it so long or so exclusively as to receive its marvels with the welcome of familiarity or that tranquil expectation with which one looks for the next apparition of wonder in a dream.

To have felt the growing difficulties of faith, and the increasing intellectual anarchy in the years between 1832 and 1851 one must have been born some years later than Tennyson and have known Oxford in those days when, as Mr. Froude writes, the creeds or no creeds were whirling young spirits about like leaves in an autumn storm. It is this whirl which we feel in the poetry of Clough, and yet amid the whirl we become aware of the steadfastness of a nature, sorely perplexed indeed, and driven hither and thither, yet of unwavering moral integrity. No doctrine offered for his acceptance seemed to give him a complete account of the facts of life; the dogmas of theology were the translations into the language of the intellect of religious instincts and aspirations, the reality of which he could not and would not deny; yet the ascertained truths of science seemed to render the acceptance of theological dogma impossible. Perhaps a future reconciliation of these conflicting aspects of truth might be hoped for; meanwhile it was the duty of a man who would not practise a fraud on his own intellect to hold himself unattached to positive creeds, whether theological or scientific; it was a duty to wait for further light. Let us, said Clough, attend the clouded hill, and expect the voice of him who entered into the cloud. Perhaps he will descend the mount with sacred light shining from his countenance, bearing the tables of the new law; meanwhile, let us not turn back to Egypt, nor dance at the bidding of the priest around a Golden Calf. This mood of waiting for further light, this attitude of expectant attention, would become with many natures a source of moral weakness, and

might give a dangerous vantage-ground to temptations of egoism and faithless self-indulgence. Clough maintained his attitude strenuously and with a certain self-denial under the strictest sense of duty. He demonstrated that such an attitude of expectant attention is inconsistent neither with a wholesome practical activity nor with a profoundly religious spirit. There is virtue in his writings which proceeds from moral steadfastness, and a virile temper that refuses mere spiritual comfort and luxury, a pillow of faith for the weary head, an opiate of pious sentiment to lull and cloud the brain.

Clough's college friend, who has lamented his loss in the one pastoral elegy in our language which approaches Lycidas in beauty, suffered more deeply than Clough from la maladie du siècle. Mr. Matthew Arnold's poetry in great part is an exquisitely delicate and lucid record of the trials of a spirit divided against itself. Clough's nature, however it may appear otherwise to superficial observers, was not a divided nature; it was whole and sound, although perplexed by irreconcilable aspects of truth. His will was not diseased; it was prompt to act upon any authoritative summons of duty, should such summons make itself audible. Mr. Arnold's gifts as a poet were incomparably rarer and finer, but it was more difficult for him to live steadfastly his true life, the life poetic, since in him the will itself had been attacked by the malady of the age.

His various sympathies perplex and entangle him (I speak of the poet of past days, not of the prose-writer of the present); he yields on this side and recovers himself, yields on that side and recovers himself, and loses by each yielding some of the strength of his soul. He would fain simplify his life by submitting to one dominant set of motives, but he cannot. He admires the trenchant force of will of a hardy nature, but he does not see how this can be conjoined with what is dearer to himgentleness, tenderness, love. He longs for the release from isolation and selfconsciousness which passion and true fellowship with another human spirit bring, but he cannot quite attain this and relapses, confessing that love is subject to change, and that each of us must