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Pay are in the salegte great Vepra Charta da na to drms, and the lack of TAMAN KEBY TAK, CA on as well as the habit of Why that in the leans of poetic art prevents these plays fran taking with his mou satisfactory work. We are disfroad to regret that the force and genius which went to their making hud n be applied in other directions. They conbw many splendid lines and stirring passages, many fine Situations, and masterly delineations of character; but they do and show Tennyson at his best; and the greater a writer

is, the more stringent is our demand that he maintain his highest level.

ites.

To many, Tennyson's shorter pieces will remain the favorSome of them seem the very flower of human speech. "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," "The Lady of Shallott," "The Lotus Eaters," "Love and Death,” “A Dream of Fair Women," "The Sleeping Beauty," and that last noble message—"Crossing the Bar;" these and many another as we read them, seem to attain the limits of beauty in measure, rhyme and thought. But it is still too early to decide what of Tennyson is most nearly immortal. He lies in Westminster Abbey; and it is enough for us to know that so long as that historic church stands, his fame is likely to endure. Or we might say that the English language which he has dignified and enriched will not outlast the noble creations which he has incarnated in it.

TEARS, IDLE TEARS.

TEARS, idle tears, I know not what they mean
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Tile FRCSONTEM SE MOOPITAL,
MADISON AVE, & 70th ST.-

NEW YORK, M. Y

OF OLD SAT FREEDOM ON THE HEIGHTS.

Of old sat Freedom on the heights,

The thunders breaking at her feet:
Above her shook the starry lights:
She heard the torrents meet.

There in her place she did rejoice,
Self-gathered in her prophet-mind,
But fragments of her mighty voice
Came rolling on the wind.

Then stept she down thro' town and field
To mingle with the human race,
And part by part to men revealed
The fullness of her face-

Grave Mother of majestic works,
From her isle-altar gazing down,
Who, God-like, grasps the triple forks,
And, King-like, wears the crown:

Her open eyes desire the truth.
The wisdom of a thousand years
Is in them. May perpetual youth
Keep dry their light from tears;

That her fair form may stand and shine,

Make bright our days and light our dreams, Turning to scorn with lips divine

The falsehood of extremes.

ELAINE'S LETTER TO GUINEVERE.

THEN spake the lily maid of Astolat;
"Sweet father, all too faint and sick am I
For anger: these are slanders: never yet
Was noble man but made ignoble talk.
He makes no friend who never made a foe.
But now it is my glory to have loved
One peerless, without stain: so let me pass,
My father, howsoe'er I seem to you,

Not all unhappy, having loved God's best
And greatest, tho' my love had no return:
Yet, seeing you desire your child to live,
Thanks, but you work against your own desire;
For if I could believe the things you say
I should but die the sooner; wherefore cease,
Sweet father, and bid call the ghostly man
Hither, and let me shrive me clean and die."
So when the ghostly man had come and gone,
She with a face, bright as for sin forgiven,
Besought Lavaine to write as she devised
A letter, word for word; and when he asked
"Is it for Lancelot, is it for my dear lord?
Then will I bear it gladly;" she replied,
"For Lancelot and the Queen and all the world,
But I myself must bear it." Then he wrote
The letter she devised; which being writ
And folded, "O sweet father, tender and true,
Deny me not," she said-" you never yet
Denied my fancies-this, however strange,
My latest: lay the letter in my hand
A little ere I die, and close the hand

Upon it; I shall guard it even in death.

And when the heat is gone from out my heart,
Then take the little bed on which I died
For Lancelot's love, and deck it like the Queen's
For richness, and me also like the Queen
In all I have of rich, and lay me on it.
And let there be prepared a chariot-bier
To take me to the river, and a barge
Be ready on the river, clothed in black.
I go in state to court, to meet the Queen.
There surely I shall speak for mine own self,
And none of you can speak for me so well.
And therefore let our dumb old man alone
Go with me, he can steer and row, and he
Will guide me to that palace, to the doors."

She ceased: her father promised; whereupon She grew so cheerful that they deemed her death Was rather in the fantasy than the blood.

But ten slow mornings past, and on the eleventh

lack some of its most exquisite graces and most felicitous and penetrating interpretations.

Tennyson's outward life was uneventful. He entered Cambridge in 1828, with Hallam (son of the historian), Trench and Houghton; was compelled by his slender income to defer his marriage until 1850, when he was forty-one; was raised to the laureate-ship of England in the same year, and accepted a peerage in 1884. He was no traveler, rarely leaving England, and never realizing the hope of his youth, "To see, before I die, the palms and temples of the south." He died in 1892, well past the age of fourscore, but with the fineness of his genius unabated. His history is that of his mind and heart, which is shadowed forth in his writings, yet ever veiled beneath the reticences of pure art. He was great enough to eschew the individual and singular in the published expression of his thought, and to offer only those ideas and feelings which are catholic in the race. All who have loved and lost have experienced the emotions of "In Memoriam ;" no one who has meditated deeply on the problems of the age can fail to find his best conclusions in "Locksley Hall;" scepticism may find its utterance and its answer in "The Two Voices;" the refusal of the soul to stay in mortal limitations resounds in "Ulysses;" the passion, purity and exaltation of love are portrayed in "Enone," "Maud," "Love and Duty," "Tears, Idle Tears," "The Gardener's Daughter," and many other lovely poems; the mockery of beauty without God is shown in "The Palace of Art;" the grandeur of patriotism, civil and military, is expressed in the "Ode on the Death of Wellington" and in "England;" and so we might continue. In a word, the life of his age flowed through Tennyson, and found in him its broadest utterance. Philosophy, science, history and art were elemental spirits employed by this Prospero to give body, color and pertinence to his harmonious creations; his brain was balanced by his heart, and the first was as lofty as the last was deep.

The beginnings of the poet's career were not ambitious. Before he was twenty, he and his brother published a small volume of "Poems by Two Brothers," which showed faculty, but no definite aim. His "Poems Chiefly Lyrical," appear