Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,

And only thro' the faded leaf

The chesnut pattering to the ground:
Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

These leaves that redden to the fall;

And in my heart, if calm at all,

If any calm, a calm despair:

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,

And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast

Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

Take another mood-one that prevails through In Memoriam, the first strain of which strikes the same noble key-note, but which has no higher expression than in these four stanzas:

I

envy not in any moods

The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes

His license in the field of time,
Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest,

The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth,

Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Is that morbid, hysterical, unhealthy? Or is it the profoundest vindication, at once of love and of sorrow for the loss of those we love? It may appear inconsistent for one who believes that his friend lives in God,' and who also believes that 'immortal love' rules the destinies of men, to grieve at all. But the paradox belongs not to our imperfect

stage of faith. It was manifested fully in the life of Him who was our example,-who wept for the Lazarus He was about to recal from the tomb-wept tears of blood in prospect of the sacrifice that was to redeem the race of which He was the Head. Neither his omniscience, nor his infinite power, saved Him from a real sorrow. Pain is pain, and loss is loss, though neither is eternal. Man being man, lives in the present, though he can look forward to the future; and his belief that the sun will rise to-morrow does not make to-night less dark. Love and grief are inseparably united under the conditions of human life. If we reject the one, we cannot enjoy the other. Poetry and passion are nobler and wiser than stoicism or Epicureanism, and their voices join to say,

Let Love clasp Grief, lest both be drowned.

Some of the finest strains of In Memoriam are devoted to topics connected with the question of personal immortality. No. 35 is the answer to Comtian materialism, which the mere intellect is quite unable to refute. That very progress on which Comte bases his system is due to the truth he refuses to acknowledge. Had men been Comtians from the beginning, there would have been no science, no material progress, no law of development of ideas; and were men to all become Comtians, these would not only cease, but the world would rapidly retrograde into a savage state of beastliness and stupidity. Apart from the beauty and force of the expression, nothing can be completer as a philosophical essay :

Yet if some voice that man could trust,

Should murmur from the narrow house:
The cheeks drop in; the body bows;

Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:

Might I not say, yet even here,

But for one hour, O Love, I strive
To keep so sweet a thing alive?

But I should turn mine ears and hear

The moanings of the homeless sea,

The sound of streams that swift or slow
Draw down Eonian hills, and sow

The dust of continents to be;

And love would answer with a sigh,

'The sound of that forgetful shore

Will change my sweetness more and more,

Half dead to know that I shall die.'

O me, what profits it to put

An idle case? If Death were seen

At first as Death, Love had not been,

Or been in narrowest working shut,

Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,

Or in his coarsest satyr-shape

Had bruised the herb and crush'd the grape,

And bask'd and batten'd in the woods.

Yet Mr. Tennyson is the last person to accept falsification of science, partial views of material nature, as a refuge from hopeless scepticism. He is one like the friend he mourns, who

Fought his doubts and gathered strength.

It is as much for its unreserved sincerity and resolute stand upon ascertained facts of nature, as for its noble poetry and its passionate cleaving to a higher truth above nature, that we quote No. 55:

'So careful of the type?' but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, a thousand types are gone.'
I care for nothing, all shall go.
Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit doth but mean the breath:
I know no more! And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed,

And love Creation's final law-
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?
No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him.
O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

And, as a last echo of this morbid, hysterical poem-which the poetry-critic of Blackwood does not make part of his travelling library, but leaves on the shelf with Blair's Grave, preferring, it may be presumed, Bon Gaultier's Ballads,

Firmilian, and Aytoun's Lays of the Cavaliers (all very clever productions, against which we have not a word to say, any more than against Punch, The Rejected Addresses, and the last new military quadrilles)-let us listen to the New-Year's hymn which, somehow, the people of England has taken for its national song of hope and prophecy of all good things to

come:

Ring out wild bells to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

G. B.

GENERAL EDUCATION AND CLASSICAL

STUDIES.

'I maintain that Greek and Latin are peculiar and indispensable elements of a liberal education.'-Dr. WHEWELL On the Principles of English University Education, page 33.

THERE has grown up of late years in England, especially

among persons engaged in trade, a strong feeling against the system of education pursued in our grammar - schools. During the long peace, the attention of our countrymen has been so exclusively directed to commercial development, mechanical inventions, and manufacturing processes, that whatever is not a means to these ends comes to be regarded as nothing worth. The number of those has greatly increased who, to use the words of Bacon, call upon men to sell their books and build furnaces, quitting and forsaking Minerva and the Muses as barren virgins, and relying upon Vulcan.'* Moreover, great as has been the growth of our external commerce, yet at home, the ratio which the town population bears to the country,-in other words, the proportion of manufacturers and retailers to customers, has increased still more; and the result is a fierce competition, which constrains the tradesman and artisan to abridge their children's schooltime, and also to insist upon their being taught only what can be turned to immediate account. A hard race is before them a race for very life-wherein he who lags is lost, and for that race they must be trained. A boy may be able to discriminate between nummi and pecunia, but that accomplishment will not get him a clerkship, if he is slow at compound addition. Again, why teach metrical feet to one who is destined to manipulate a yard-wand? Is not book-keeping better than book-learning, and practice' more than prosody? These complaints, which find their vent chiefly in provincial

* Advancement of Learning, b. ii. p. 70.